A customizable, ready-to-compile boilerplate for Game Boy RGBDS projects.
You can simply clone the repository using Git, or if you just want to download this, click the green Clone or download button up and to the right of this.
Make sure you have RGBDS and Make installed. (GNU Make might be a requirement, but I'm not sure.) Python 3 is required for some tools.
Edit Makefile.conf to customize most things specific to the project (like the game name, file name and extension, etc.). Everything is commented.
Everything in the src folder is the source, and can be freely modified however you want. The basic structure in place should hint you at how things are organized. If you want to create a new "module" (such as the existing home, engine, memory...), you simply need to drop a .asm file in the src directory (name does not matter). All files in that root directory will be compiled individually.
The file at src/res/build_date.asm is compiled individually to include a build date in your ROM. Always comes in handy, and also displayed in the bundled error screen.
If you want to add resources, I recommend using the res folder: create one folder per resource, create a Makefile inside, and have it explain how to generate the needed resource. (Most likely a binary file.) If file foo.bar exists, a built-in rule exists to generate foo.bar.pb16, by compressing the file using PB16 (a variation of PackBits).
By default, the boilerplate contains a few files that are technically not required, but should come in handy to most GB devs:
- A collection of common routines in
home/utils.asm - Some more common routines in the RST vectors as well as a fairly simple VBlank handler in
home/vectors.asm - A PB16 decompressor by @PinoBatch in
unpb16.asm - SGB routines in
sgb.asm - A small but sufficient init code, including a completely unnecessary but nice-looking Nintendo logo fade-out in
home/header.asm - A complete and very useful for debugging error handler in
engine/error_handler.asmOf course, all of those can be removed if you don't care about them.
Simply put yourself in the root directory of this project, and run the command make. This should create a bunch of things, including the output in the bin folder.
If you get errors that you don't understand, try running make clean. If that gives the same error, try deleting the deps folder. If that still doesn't work, try deleting the bin and obj folders as well. If that still doesn't work, you probably did something wrong yourself.