gameboy development guide

Last update: Thu Jun 5 22:25:41 2025

See my other Gameboy related pages
The goal of this page is to make a logical, simple workflow and entry point on how to start from an idea to a game running on your physical Gameboy.

I - Materials

Make images

Make sprites or extract them from existing games with GbReaper.

Make sounds

For making simple sounds, use that : GBSoundDemo.

II - Coding

Coding the game

My "guide" Gameboy guts and programming but in a nutshell:

Code in ASM if you want to make a serious, complex game

Code in C if you're ok with a small, casual game and ready to have average performance

I code in C so my TL;DR is:

Install the latest sdcc (readme below)

Clone GBDK-n

Edit the GBDK-n's bin/ scripts by changing the path to sdcc to latest sdcc

Build GBDK-n (just run make at the root, if you didn't edit but created new scripts edit the Makefile to force usage of latest sdcc)

VS code or Eclipse work to code in C

You're good to go, start coding!

Installing latest SDCC

Well, last time I did a few years ago it was easy as far as I remember: download latest version, unbzip and done. I rna into a problem though: the prebuilt latest 4.2 was built with more recent libc version than my ubuntu 20.4.
EASY FIX: pick version 4.0 or 4.1 (4.1 worked out of the box).
HARDER FIX: just build SDCC from the source on my PC.

Get the source from sdcc (in the sdcc/ folder)

tar jxf thesource.tar.bz2

RTFM

./configure

A few packages I was missing : sudo apt install bison flex libboost-graph-dev texinfo

./configure (this time should work)

make (go grab a coffee)

sudo make install

Testing the game

The best is BGB and runs on windows or Linux under wine

visualboyadvance runs also on Linux but has a worse reputation than bgb so keep it as a second option in case

III - Making a physical cartridge

Making the PCB

The 32 kB PCB is what you want, and more confusing details on the gameboy homebrew cartridge page.

Writing the ROM

Gameboy homebrew cartridge writer client software in Python3 to upload your code to the EEPROM

Use the TL866II EEPROM writer

Assemble

Solder the EEPROM on the PCB, then you're done

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