Awesome Game Boy Development

A curated list of awesome Game Boy (Color) Development resources, tools, docs, related projects and homebrews. Inspired by the awesome list thing.

This project is open source and community-lead. Come contribute!


Introduction

The Game Boy, a hardware autopsyopen in new window



The Ultimate Game Boy Talkopen in new window



Disambiguation

Game Boy Advance

Game Boy Advance development is covered by another project, the awesome-GBAdevopen in new window list. GBA, however, can run GB/GBC games. It does so in a slightly different way compared to native hardware. This is covered in the Emulator Development section of this list.

Game Boy Color and Super Game Boy

This list is focused on the original (1989) Game Boy (DMG), the Game Boy Color (GBC) and Super Game Boy (SGB) are very similar systems, with a few important distinctions, such as:

  • Different hardware specifications
  • Specific hardware and software features
  • Specific registers
  • Specific bugs, quirks and exploitable behaviours

If you aim to develop your software for SGB or GBC, or you want to know how it runs on the other systems, you may want to take advantage and adapt to these differences, check the Game Boy Color category and look for specific references to GBC/CGB and SGB.

Documentation

Opcodes

Game Boy Color

Hardware

Peripherals

Cartridges

Custom cartridges

Misc

Emulator Development

Testing

Software Development

The Choosing tools for Game Boy developmentopen in new window essay provides an overview of the available development tools for Game Boy.

Assemblers

Compilers

Experimental/Proof of Concepts

Emulators

Complete list of open source emulators

Tools

Engines

Development tools

Graphics utilities

Hardware and ROM utilities

Music drivers and trackers

Programming

Guides, tutorials and tools to develop software for Game Boy using the development toolchains described in the Software Development chapter.

ASM

Sources

Fragments of code, effects, proof of concepts and generally non complete games.

Timings

Boilerplates and libraries

Syntax highlighting packages

C

Homebrews

Complete and open source games.

  • Homebrew Hubopen in new window - A community-led attempt to collect, archive and preserve every unlicensed and homebrew game released for Game Boy. Entries are playable online.

ASM

C

GB Studio

Demos

Reverse Engineering

Game Disassemblies

Game Boy Camera

Retrieving images

Game Boy Printer emulation (e.g. to retrieve images from the camera):

Changing the camera's behavior

Methods to improve and/or manipulate the camera's quality and behavior:

Post processing

Directories

Websites