gba2k

A GBA development project.

FAQ

• How does this relate to the gba crate?

Starting with the hard ones I see. Uh, so the story there is that I guess I've given up on trying develop the gba crate further. It's at a point where it has a non-zero number of users other than myself use it, and I don't want to mess up what those people are doing, but I also think that the entire organization of the crate needs a major overhaul.

• How do I do [thing] with this crate?

You probably can't yet! Currently the crate is very new, and quite limited. Rather than just adding a million things at once, I'm trying this time to add to the crate more slowly and carefully. Also, I usually only work on this when I'm avoiding my other project that I want to get done in 2022. So expect development to move quite slowly.

System Setup

There's a few steps of system setup that I did which need to be mentioned before you'll be able to build/use this repository.

Get mGBA

You should download a copy of the mgba emulator. Downloads are provided for the common platforms.

If you're the foolish kind of person like me that does GBA development in a shed in their backyard on a raspberry pi then you'll need to build mGBA from source yourself:

sudo apt-get install cmake libelf-dev qtbase5-dev libsdl2-dev
git clone [email protected]:mgba-emu/mgba.git
cd mgba
mkdir build
cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX:PATH=/usr ..
make
sudo make install

There's a few GBA emulators besides just mGBA, but I happen to know that mGBA lets you load and run ELF files directly, which makes just a little nicer for us. It also has some handy debugging features that will help during development.

Get your compilation tools

We'll need to use Nightly for our project because we'll have to use build-std. It should be included in a default installation, but we'll need the rust-stc component so that the build of the standard library can happen.

rustup component add rust-src

Also, we'll need the ARM Binutils because the linker that comes with rust doesn't work as far back as we need. You can download these from the Official ARM Developer Site, or you can maybe get them from your package manager. For debian-like systems the correct package should be under binutils-arm-none-eabi, Arch seems to call it arm-linux-gnueabi-binutils.

Lastly, a normal compilation will have rustc produce a ELF file. mGBA can load and run an ELF file, but if you want an actual ROM that could run on hardware there's a few extra steps, one of which is using a tool called gbafix. There's a C version that you can get with the Dev Kit Pro ARM distribution, but there's also a Rust version you can just build/install it through cargo.

cargo install gbafix