While checking some old ports of Deniska, who is known for plenty of game ports to the Playstation Portable, I’ve realized there is a GBA version of “Nicky Boum”.

Gregory Montoir (aka cyx) has written an engine, which allows playing this Amiga 500 classic on Win32 and Gameboy Advance.

The release is from late 2007, but still worth mentioning.

Story:

The player controls ‘Nicky’, a little boy who embarks on an adventure through a fantastical land to find an elixir to save his grandfather from a spell cast on him by the evil sorceress Zoldrane.

Nicky can walk, jump, and in an original theme can throw apple cores to defend himself against the monsters occupying the levels. Aside from throwing apple cores, the player can pick up other items to throw at enemies such as bouncy balls and logs. The logs can also be used to build bridges at certain parts of the levels.

Nicky is able to jump on enemies to defeat them, which is often more difficult but lets the monsters drop point items to collect. When jumped on, some enemies such as giant snails will split into multiple smaller versions of themselves.

The game consists of 8 levels based on 4 separate themes including a swamp, dark forest and a castle.

http://cyxdown.free.fr/nicky/

Kojote had the pleasure to conduct an interview with Dwedit recently, who is known to have enhanced a couple of emulators to be used with a Gameboy Advance, and is author of a TI-83 emulator himself.

Make sure to visit Dwedit’s homepage and enjoy his marvellous work he did for the Gameboy Advance and TI-83 community. His page is located here: http://www.dwedit.org/

The interview:

Kojote:
Hello Dwedit – You are one of the last Gameboy Advance developers, known for regular updates on the emulators PocketNES and Goomba Color. What makes you stay with this platform? But before that, tell us a little bit about yourself.
Dwedit:
Hi, I’m Dan Weiss, also known as Dwedit. I’ve been heavily involved with computers (Apple ][) and video games (NES) about age 5, and have been programming since before age 8. Applesoft Basic, QBasic, ZZT, Klik & Play, Games Factory… They’re all important stepping stones to get into programming. After a while of messing around with all of that, I was decent at programming. Make sure you know basic programming before you try ZZT and Klik & Play though.
The biggest life-changing event in my life was seeing someone run Super Mario Bros 3 on a PC using Nesticle. I was pretty shocked by this; it was the coolest thing ever. The best part was the glitches, how the mushroom drew in front of the item box. Immediately, I was hooked on emulators and romz. Soon afterwards, I got involved in the Romhacking Scene then I wrote a Dragon Warrior town editor in QBasic. Copying the idea from Mario Improvement, I registered a hotmail account for the dragon warrior editor, “dwedit AT hotmail.com.” Then I just kept that as my online name ever since.
In high school, I was very heavily involved in the TI83 scene. Those calculators are just awesome; it’s like being able to be a cool 1980’s programmer on hardware of similar specifications. The 80’s were way before my time, never really got to experience them. Much more of a 1990+ NES kid than anything else.
I was doing some TI-Basic. I actually started out with that when my brother got his TI82 a long time ago, so I already knew how to program a TI83 by the time I finally got one. For a while, I was playing all these awesome TI83 games, RPGs, Arcade Games, awesome stuff. Eventually, by my junior/senior year, I was making Z80 assembly language games for them! Assembly language rocks. I did some awesome stuff on the TI83, even making a Bubble Bobble clone. But you really need the experience that comes from working with binary data, romhacking experience. Get romhacking down, and you unconsciously learn all the concepts needed for assembly language.
I actually did ASM before I did C++.

Kojote:
How did you get into GBA coding?
Dwedit:
First I tried out some crappy tutorials for DevKitAdvance, making the amazing “turn the screen red” program, then I gave up because trying to wait for vblank always crashed.
Then I saw PocketNES get really good, so I got an MBV2 cable so I could finally try it out on a GBA. There was a little problem; you can’t save, so I did my first hack for pocketnes, which was to give it SRAM cannibalism, so I could save in Zelda. Later on I got a flash cartridge so I didn’t need the MBV2 cable anymore.
Diving into PocketNES wasn’t too hard. The first ASM stuff I did for it was finishing up Flubba’s work on speed hacks, and that’s where I wrote my first ever ARM ASM. If you’ve been coding for years on the Z80, picking up ARM takes about a couple days, and it’s a total dream to program for compared with the Z80.
The major thing I did with PocketNES before I really started rewriting bits of it was adding GBAMP support. You finally get to use Virtual Memory concepts.
I still haven’t made any complete homebrew software other than emulators.

Kojote:
You are mainly into writing emulators, what is the fascination behind this? Wouldn’t game coding be much easier?
Dwedit:
I never actually wrote any emulators from scratch, Loopy and Flubba make great code. I only started maintaining it after they finished up all their work. I have rewritten significant parts of their emulators though, like adding Color to Goomba and the many new features for Pocketnes. But writing emulators is much easier than making games, because I can’t draw worth crap. 🙂

Kojote:
Will you continue working on your TI-83 emulator? If so, what are your plans for it?
Dwedit:
That’s something I know I really need to update. I know this because I recently tried to use it on a math test, and it was woefully inadequate to use.
The main reason I made the TI83 emulator is that I knew the TI83 so well. The other motivating factor was some guy making the “I will give a bounty for a TI83 NDS emulator” post on the GBAdev forums, but I didn’t give a damn about the bounty, never even inquired about it anyway.

Kojote:
What is your favorite GBA homebrew product and why?
Dwedit:
Definitely the big 3 emulators (PocketNES, Goomba Color, SMSAdvance). But I don’t know of too many GBA homebrew products. The only other homebrew I’ve tried is Tetanus on Drugs by Tepples.

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Kojote:
If you would have to help out a GBA coding newbie, what would be some of your suggestions?
Dwedit:
Interrupt handlers! Get them in ASAP! Then you can add in your Hello World message.
Also, *Use Object Tables*! You get a structure for your program that way, code that loops over the object table and calls a handler based on the type of that object. Many attributes are shared with different object types, like coordinates and animation. They’re good enough for commercial developers, the M.C. Kids guy even used them.

Kojote:
If you were to completely abandon GBA development, which system would you choose next and why?
Dwedit:
When I abandon the GBA, the successor to the Wii will probably be out by then. I’m not great at doing 3D engines and stuff, never got very far there by myself. Maybe I need to join a bigger development team to make cooler stuff.

Kojote:
If you look away from the GBA scene, which console or handheld would you consider most successful in having the most homebrew releases these days?
Dwedit:
Definitely the TI83+ scene. The high school students are learning ASM left and right for this thing, and making many more cool programs than any other handheld.
However, if you’re asking about “recent”, TI83+ development has definitely slowed down. The original and second generations of ASM wizards have graduated high school and college, and nobody appears to be taking their places.

Kojote:
How do you see the future of GBA homebrew?
Dwedit:
People who love the SNES will always want to try the GBA, since its hardware makes SNES-style games so easy to do.

Kojote:
Thanks for your time and good luck with your future projects!
Dwedit:
You’re welcome.

Thanks a lot to Adam B. and Dave C. ( Guyfawkes – http://www.emuboards.com ) for proofreading. Also thanks a lot to Dwedit for his time!

A discussion thread is open here: http://www.pdroms.de/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=50&t=454

http://www.dwedit.org/

Yodajr, OMG and Archilolo updated their Super Mario fangame “The Last GBA Quest”.

This release is declared as final version – what are you waiting for? Go and grab it!

http://www.playeradvance.org/forum/showthread.php?t=6122

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:

[All but GBA]: When you load a game, the fact you have loaded it is immediately saved. This means you can no longer power down before you die to avoid save scumming. (Eilu, Zach Firth)
Familiars always leave corpses to facillitate their resurrection.
Petrified creatures count to your kill total
You are only punished for the death of a familiar when the death becomes irrevocable.
The party guilty for creating traps, lava, etc, is now tracked so proper responsibility can be assigned. (Andrew Poandl)
Dodge Skill’s “foes” properly ‘ified. (David Damerell)
Extra flavour text from Eilu.
Ricochet skill for arrows. (Furrot)
You can climb trees. (Adam Boyd)
When a bitmap has to many colours, it now fails more gracefully. (Ibson the Grey)
An embarassing mistake in combat calcs has been fixed. It is now the attacker’s skill, not the defender’s, used to roll attack bonus. This will mean weapon skills are more necessary and make monsters more threatening since they always default to 2 stars.
Jumping out of a pit only moves you one square. (Irashtar)
Incorrect there in helm of draining description (Mark Rushakoff)
Adjusted some monster sizes to better reflect how I envision them. Hopefully this doesn’t affect food nutrition balance too much. (David Damerell)
When you die your options are saved even if you don’t make the high score table. (Zappa Penguin)
Knock no longer closes the door if an item or creature blocks it.
Knock cast on doors with creatures on them will knock them back and damage them slightly. (Lim-Dul)
Light radius for creatures on fire increased to 2 from 1 to make it a bit less subtle. (R. Dan Henry)
[Start] and [Select] can be used to enter and shift respectively on the on-screen keyboard. (Zappa Penguin)
You can eat water elementals, but be warned there might still be some life in them. (Eilu)
Polying into or polying back into gargantuan forms will crush any walls that would entrap you. (Korgoth)
Flaming swords slightly nerfed to 1d3 fire damage to prevent them from being such an obvious weapon choice.
New item: lightning rapier. (Terje)
New item: ice mace.
Imps summoned by demons that you summon will no longer attack you provided the demon stil lives.
Monsters should now open doors if they are smart enough. (Derek Ray)
New monster: Kobold Thief.
You can now wish to learn a skill directly rather than having to acquire the specific book.
“wizard’s hands” in chilling touch description, “an uber-storm” for a living frost, along with an extra hyphen in that description. Description of Pax clarified to resolve amiguous sentence and disarm skill description has an s returned to it. Finally, another lost s added to the flesh golem description. (R. Dan Henry)
“You gain insight into the nature of foo.” now has a full stop. (David Damerell)
Ibson the Grey has produced a new 32×32 tileset based on the rltiles to give you some high resolution POWDER experience. Since this isn’t the 16×16 res, it doesn’t come packaged with POWDER but has to be installed manually from the artpack.

Note: While the highscore is kept, save games are never preserved between versions. Please wait until your current character dies before upgrading.

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

According to Nathan Tolbert, coder of the homebrew GBA RPG “Aguna”, there was a minor bugfix recently.

Quote from //phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=452 :

By the way, I just reposted the rom with a minor bug fix, so if you happen to end up hosting a copy of the file, make sure you get the latest.

Anguna is an older-style adventure game, which encourages exploration, and doesn’t hold your hand and tell you where to go at every step of the way.

http://www.tolberts.net/anguna

Anguna is a Gameboy Advance homebrew game created by Nathan Tolbert, featuring art by Chris Hildenbrand.

It is a short but exciting action-adventure game, reminiscant of the original Legend of Zelda.

Anguna includes:

5 dungeons and a large overworld to explore
Multiple weapons and items including: a sword, bow & arrows, bear traps, dynamite, lantern, magic boots, and more
Many hidden rooms, secrets, and powerups
Lots of interesting enemies and boss monsters

Anguna is available as a free download. To play it, you will either need to play it on a gameboy advance emulator, such as Visual Boy Advance, or write it to a writable gameboy cartridge. Alternatively, you can download a windows installer from here which includes everything you need to play Anguna on windows.

For those that are interested in obtaining a physical cartridge of Anguna to play on their Gameboy Advance, please contact the author, and for the price of the writable cartridge (which varies between $10 and $40 dollars, depending on what is available) plus shipping. It will be written to a cartridge and sent to you.

The first person can be to find all of the hidden powerups in the game. The winner will receive a free cartridge of Anguna to play on an actual Gameboy Advance.

Discussion: //phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=452

http://www.tolberts.net/anguna/

Here comes another SM3 player for Gameboy Advance.

Quote:

As it’s obvious, this is ANOTHER S3M player. Lol. BUT… different from every other S3M player I’ve seen, this one takes raw S3M files. It also does a pretty weird interpolation method but seems to be fine: a = ((b << 7) + c) >> 8. Though it can take up room easily, it’ll be just find for a one song game like thing. I’m not going to release the source yet until I figure out a few bugs and get the effects working (no effects ATM >.<"). But enjoy for now. (Song name: The Final Battle - FFIV Advance (an old version I made ROFL)

http://www.gbadev.org/demos.php?showinfo=1360

LOCKJAW is a free software implementation of the so-called Soviet Mind Game, a highly popular computer puzzle game that involves guiding tetrominoes into neat stacks in a well. This game was designed in the mid-1980s by Russian game designer Alexey Pajitnov and was first implemented in a software product called TETRIS(R).

Changes: v0.45 (2008-04-20)

* New unified speed curve system: less code, more tables, for future loading from a file (bug 0040).
* All speed curves except Rhythm and Rhythm Zero have been ported to the new system. Notably, Master has been rewritten based on the tables from the wiki, and Exponential uses sections. The lock delay speeds up as brutally after 600 pieces as always.
* Added kludge in the basic makefile that allows building on *BSD and GNU/Linux: ‘make linux’ (patch by kesiev).
* ljpath: Fixed a couple misspellings in the non-Windows code path (reported by kesiev).
* ljpath: Supports libfat when running on Nintendo DS.
* A few descriptions of options have been shortened to fit into the new GBA/DS look (reported by Bloodstar; patch by caffeine).
* Writes result and options text to standard output as well as to lj-scores.txt. This allows you to do ‘lj | postprocessor’ even if you can’t do ‘tail -f lj-scores.txt’ (requested by kesiev).
* DS: Writes result and options to /data/lockjaw/lj-scores.txt.

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

http://www.pineight.com/lj/

devkitARM is a complete toolchain to allow development on various systems, such as for DS, GBA and GP32.

Release notes:

The latest release of the ARM toolchain is now available. There are a number of improvements:

binutils updated to 2.18.50
gcc updated to 4.3.0
grit updated to 0.8
ndstool now uses default.arm7 from libnds directory
newlib multibyte code enabled with C-UTF8 locale

devkitPro Updater 1.4.6 now downloads and installs the default.arm7 file used for arm9 only projects separately from libnds. This will allow us to maintain a much improved default arm7 core which will later include built in wifi support.

As usual, windows users should run the updater which will update itself, make sure you add the new default arm7 when shown the update list.

http://www.devkitpro.org/

FluBBa has released a minor update of his Sega Master System emulator for Gameboy Advance.

Changes:

* Fixed config loading for gamma setting.

http://www.ndsretro.com/index.html