Support RGBDS

[tobiasvl]

Interesting approach! Could this be expanded to support RGBDS projects?

[rob2d]

Thanks for the question and feedback. Well, considering the nature of time and how low level some of these things are/how long it took to get up to speed with GBDK... If you happen to be a maintainer for this project and want to sync up, we can try to make that happen :) The way the project works if you give it an arbitrary configuration and it watches folders/executes commands. Code is flexible/modular enough that we could change up what apps we're spawning and what command line params to run. Just need a lot more info on details is all. Been very busy but if I get a chance I'll otherwise try to look into it.

[tobiasvl]

Not a maintainer, I just develop games using RGBDS :) I'll take a look too, thanks for considering it!

[rob2d]

Hm, this seems to be extremely low level. While it's super impressive, I'm not sure I have the leeway to support ASM oriented build systems since... well... I barely have time for doing anything with GBDK which is oriented around C :) And there's no fun if you can't dogfood your own product. But by the way: have you looked into Asmotor? It seems RGBDS hasn't been touched since 1997 and the original author has moved on to that for GB Rom dev:

https://code.google.com/archive/p/asmotor/

[tobiasvl]

I think you must be looking at an older fork of RBGDS than the one I linked to. The current mainline is very actively maintained (last commit 8 days ago). I don't know anybody in the ASM Game Boy homebrew community who uses anything else than RGBDS.

If anything, GBDK is pretty dead! It hasn't been touched since 2001? But of course there are forks like gbdk-n (and other frameworks on top of GBDK like ZGB) that use a more modern SDCC version.

[rob2d]

Oh, that's pretty interesting to hear. I did not get much from a Google search. Thanks. Actually, GBDK has a lot of very active users :) you can find pretty lively discussion at: http://gbdev.gg8.se/
(I have yet to register but it's helped me quite a bit with getting up to speed)

A friend and I noticed some commercial stuff being done with GBDK, so we wanted to figure it out and it was a huge PITA -- we hate low level dev lol (but not afraid of it). Also many tools we found like tile editors, music system, etc were for GBDK... not finding much on RGBDS for non ASM dev. I'm currently working on a tile editing system that separates colors, can select 8x8 pics and exports code with a web interface for it to further streamline GB dev here and there for the last few months. Not sure if that's possible to use with RGBDS though so if you can enlighten me that'd be great.

You can find info on his project here: http://www.gmiller.net/2018/07/gameboy-color-fix-it-felix-jr/

(@orokro you should consider putting up your ROM btw... not showing off your work 😛 )

[tobiasvl]

Actually I think the original 1997 project called RGBDS died, and ASMotor became the new RGBDS... But I'm not clear on the details of that history, hehe. Yeah, I hang out at the gbdev forums. I guess most of the ASM talk there has moved to IRC and then Discord, but the GBDK crowd stayed on the forums.

There are tools for RGBDS too, most are probably collected here: https://github.com/avivace/awesome-gbdev#tools

I've actually read about that Fix It Felix Jr. port before on the gbdev forums 😄

[rob2d]

Oh nice! Yeah. Thanks for the link! That was Greg... he's a beast. Took him just a few days if I recall correctly. B&W helped for the second half though 😄