gb-boilerplate

A minimal, customizable, ready-to-compile boilerplate for Game Boy RGBDS projects.

Downloading

You can simply clone the repository using Git, or if you just want to download this, click the Clone or download button up and to the right of this. This repo is also usable as a GitHub template for creating new repositories.

Setting up

Make sure you have RGBDS, at least version 0.4.0, and GNU Make installed. Python 3 is required for the PB16 compressor bundled as a usage example, but that script is optional.

Customizing

Edit project.mk to customize most things specific to the project (like the game name, file name and extension, etc.). Everything has accompanying doc comments.

Everything in the src directory is the source, and can be freely modified however you want. Any .asm files in that directory (and its sub-directories, recursively) will be individually assembled, automatically. If you need some files not to be assembled directly (because they are only meant to be INCLUDEd), you can either rename them (typically, to .inc), or move them outside of src (typically, to a directory called include).

The file at src/assets/build_date.asm is compiled individually to include a build date in your ROM. Always comes in handy.

If you want to add resources, I recommend using the src/assets directory. Add rules in the Makefile; an example is provided for compressing files using PB16 (a variation of PackBits).

Compiling

Simply open you favorite command prompt / terminal, place yourself in this directory (the one the Makefile is located in), and run the command make. This should create a bunch of things, including the output in the bin directory.

Pass the -s flag to make if it spews too much input for your tastes. Päss the -j <N> flag to make to build more things in parallel, replacing <N> with however many things you want to build in parallel; your number of (logical) CPU cores is often a good pick (so, -j 8 for me), run the command nproc to obtain it.

If you get errors that you don't understand, try running make clean. If that gives the same error, try deleting the assets directory. If that still doesn't work, try deleting the bin and obj directories as well. If that still doesn't work, feel free to ask for help.

See also

If you want something less barebones, already including some "base" code, check out gb-starter-kit.

Perhaps a gbdev style guide may be of interest to you?

I recommend the BGB emulator for developing ROMs on Windows and, via Wine, Linux and macOS (64-bit build available for Catalina). SameBoy is more accurate, but has a more lackluster interface outside of macOS.

Libraries

• Variable-width font engine
• Structs in RGBDS