Gravity Ball Advance is a game where you fight gravity and avoid objects such as walls. There are a total of 9 levels with different environments such as reverse gravity, space, fans, and switches and three difficulty levels to choose from. At the end of every third level there is a boss you must defeat.

http://forum.gbadev.org/viewtopic.php?t=16236

Try to get (and keep) the speedbar full. There’s no points or winning to this game. It’s just a simple demonstration of the 2D and input interface in Bricks-OS.

http://bricks-os.org/index.php?page=download

News from the Giana’s Return Team…

Quote:

Widdy ( http://www.widdy.de ) a smart guy from Bavaria / Germany and member of a bunch of demogroups has started to conduct a study if a GBA version of Giana’s Return would be doable and to all our surprise the chance is pretty high.

He already has a platform engine which is highly adjusted to the GBA hardware so he just needs to push in the Giana’s Return elements and also the appropriated stuff around.

As the GBA is tile wise limited in color, he has to repixel few parts. The music we use for Giana’s Return is .XM, which can’t be handled on a GBA without too much CPU use, BUT am-fm, our new music support guy will rearrange things, so even .MOD’s will sound fine.

Let’s see how this GBA attempt will end!

http://www.gianas-return.de/?p=225

POWDER is a roguelike game, which is not a port of an existing roguelike. It is built around replayability and long term ergonomics, not short term learning. Author of this piece of software is Jeff Lait, the PS3 port comes from Bill Blake.

Changes:

Two new exciting changes in this release. First we have a new spell: Animate Forest, for those who were wondering what the point of the Grow Forest spell was. Second we have the run mode which lets you auto-follow corridors, hopefully cutting your keystrokes substantially.

– Daemon now has the a in the summon daemon spell description. (FEG)
– If a daemon decides not to be summoned, an a is put in the daemon’s name.
– PSP character dumps should now say PSP Version rather than Linux version. (Dave Hong)
– If you were in the habit of quitting without saving, the random number seed would keep being the same between games, resulting in very similar games. For those keeping track, yes, this was caused by my naive attempts to make things *more* random. (Erik Spigel)
– If you manually climb a ladder while autoprompt is enabled you no longer are immediately prompted to climb back up the ladder when you get to the other side.
– New Run command, ‘r’ for SDL users, which will cause you to run in that direction until something interesting happens. You will turn corners if there is only one way to do so. You can interrupt by hitting a key / pressing a button, useful if you find yourself running a closed loop. As the name implies, this is not meant to be some super safe way to explore the map. (PBP)
– Vi keys now support the Ctrl modifier to turn them into safe walk (David Damerell, Cuboidz)
– New spell: Animate Forest (Adam Boyd)
– When level teleporting via Wishing, do not start on same square as a monster.
– Diminishing returns on piety gains when gods already like you.
– List of items in character dump should now match order of list in inventory. (Meddyan, Cuboidz)
– Soul Suck spell no longer grants caster spells or skills that are present only due to items such as staves. (Eilu)
– Creatures that die underground should no longer have their corpse and items float to the surface. (Meddyan)
– Properly assign guilt to party responsibly for filling holes with boulders. (Meddyan)
– Properly credit kills for creatures that die from suffocation from a boulder you place. (Meddyan)
– The support programs now include cstring.h so should compile with the latest gcc. (Joe B)
– Fixed the #define guard in stdafx.h (Malte Helmert)

http://www.zincland.com/powder/index.php?pagename=release

Caramelldansen by Darklite is a Gameboy Advance Demo ranked 5th at the Kindergarden 2008 combined demo competition.

http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=52147

POWDER is a roguelike game, which is not a port of an existing roguelike. It is built around replayability and long term ergonomics, not short term learning. Author of this piece of software is Jeff Lait.

Changes:

The mouse will work again for the onscreen keyboard in SDL builds. (Ilya, Teun Peelen)
Description when wearing necro dress code spells servant right. (David Damerell, Andreas Bohm)
Vacuum correctly spelled in death message. (David Damerell)
“Click on your self to search” rather than Clicking. (Narius Varigor)
Starting as cultist will immediately tell you ><0|V|'s whim. (hotpoo) Loading a save game worshiping ><0|V| will likewise report the whim. Zapping a hostile wand of create monster will have a chance of the creature turning on you. (hotpoo) New boon from gods: hostile creatures surrounding you can be smitten. (Indirectly Ambvai) Earth hammers can be forged into artifact earth hammers with the proper setup. (David Damerell) Level up hitpoints and magic points are now 2d2+1 rather than 1d4+1, giving a tighter distribution and slight boost to the average. (Teun Peelen) Earth hammers have an encyclopedia entry. (David Damerell) When you can move in diagonals you can use the diagonals of the numberpad. (Andreas Bohm) There is now a SafeWalk mode which stops you from attacking when walking about. You can toggle this by pressing Ctrl when using the arrow keys or binding the Safe Walk command to a button in GBA mode. (Andreas Bohm) The delete key works the same as the backspace key, a useful feature on Macs whose keyboards lack a backspace. (Roger Bolton) Wishing for a level teleport no longer uses atoi() so hopefully works on gpsphone. (Roger Bolton) We now promote room flags to map flags when loading. This way loading the game on the final levels will not turn the levels into floor-diggable and hence suddenly create holes to short-circuit the levels. (Ambvai, debugged by Andreas Bohm) A case where you could achieve barbarian dress code despite not wearing armour is fixed. (Malte Helmert) You now gain piety for the barbarian and necro dress codes. (Malte Helmert) You can no longer move diagonally if both orthogonal directions are blocked by walls. Spells cast when you have the can dig intrinsic will no longer disintegrate earth elementals. (SparroHawc) Note: While the highscore is kept, save games are never preserved between versions. Please wait until your current character dies before upgrading.

Other release notes from Jeff:

Keeping with POWDER tradition, a long time between releases does not mean there was some huge secret code being worked on that took this long to get ready. It means I was busy with other stuff. That said, there are a good number of fixes in this version. Most important is likely the Safe Walk ability, derived from a patch by Andreas Bohm, which lets non-DS users the ability to avoid accidentally attacking kiwis when they go careening through the hallways. The intent is you can bind it to, say, [L], and then hold that when you want to move safely. If you want [L] to attack, you can change the global option. SDL users may use the ctrl key. Unless they are using vi-keys in which case I’m afraid they are out of luck for now. I can only hope those players believe that Safe Walk is for weaklings.

Thanks to http://www.nintendomax.com for the news.

http://www.zincland.com/powder/index.php?pagename=release

Jinroh just released his game “Christmas Pong”. It’s a pretty late christmas gift for the Gameboy Advance community, but here it is now.

Thanks to Another World of http://www.gbatemp.net for the news (yes, they do have commercial ROM presentations, but no downloads, so it’s hopefully fine to link to the news provider).

http://forum.gbadev.org/viewtopic.php?t=16180

Maximus32 got combined 2D/3D rendering and texture mapping working on a GameBoy Advance!!

Notes from Maximus32:

Looks cool doesn’t it? But since I can’t get this one to work on all supported consoles yet, I’m not going to release it.

http://bricks-os.org/

Bricks-OS is an Operating System primarily for Game Consoles. It’s main goals is to share resources between different game consoles. This is achieved by using message passing for communication.

More release notes:

The list of currently supported game consoles:
– Gameboy Advance
– Nintendo DS
– GameCube
– Playstation2
– Playstation Portable
– Wii
– i386 PC

The list of current features include:
– Preemptive multitasking (even on the GBA and NDS)
– Message passing
– Hardware OpenGL implementation (on some consoles)
– Software OpenGL implementation (for all consoles not supporting hardware 3D)

Binary versions of the latest release (v0.0.3) can be downloaded, demonstrating a Software OpenGL implementation (GBA, GC, Wii, PC, PSP), and a Hardware OpenGL implementation (NDS, PS2). The source can be downloaded using SVN, hosted by sourceforge.net.

Please take a look at Maximus32’s website for more information, screenshots and downloads: http://bricks-os.org/

Discussion: http://forum.gbadev.org/viewtopic.php?t=16166

http://bricks-os.org/

FluBBa released a new version of his NeoGeo Pocket Color emulator for GBA.

Changes:

– Fixed copy protection in “Metal Slug 2” (SNK logo in VRAM).
– Fixed control problem in “Rockman Battle & Fighters” (MIRR opcode).
– Fixed background glitch in “Memories of Pure” (HCount register).
– Fixed problems with DMA probably affecting many games.

http://www.ndsretro.com/