Mike Hawkins has sent me an email containing his Gameboy Advance application “Vero Design Advance”.

Vero Design Advance is a CAD package designed to help you layout Veroboard/stripboard designs directly on your Gameboy Advance. A detailed documentation is available with the download.

The program itself is a little bit aged, but unpublished so far. It was sent to GBAdev.org where it never made it to the mainpage and the file archive. Thanks for the release Mike!

http://www.pdroms.de/files/1515/

Goomba Color is a GBC emulator written for the GBA. Even though the GBA usually natively plays GBC games, Goomba Color provides the convenience to run multiple games from a flash cartridge, and also runs on the Nintendo DS and Game Boy Micro.

http://www.dwedit.org/gba/goombacolor.php

BITS announce their second production for Gameboy Advance: Sine Dots.

It is a little sine dots effect with 8 presets and changing colors, logotype graphics and some functional/random music.

http://forum.gbadev.org/viewtopic.php?t=14935

Goomba Color is a GBC emulator written for the GBA. Even though the GBA usually natively plays GBC games, Goomba Color provides the convenience to run multiple games from a flash cartridge, and also runs on the Nintendo DS and Game Boy Micro.

Changes:

* Tilemaps now updated in sync with tile graphics
* Lots of little optimizations and other internal changes
* No longer runs in Multiboot Mode

http://www.dwedit.org/gba/goombacolor.php

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.

After 5 years the coder Jeff Laid pulls out the 100th release of Powder. The game is available for Gameboy Advance, Nintendo DS, Linux, Windows and MacOS X.

Changes:

Remove flash when clicking on inventory items. (Richard Quirk)
Properly remove base item from inventory during drag. (Richard Quirk)
Creatures have only 30% chance of doing a last-ditch self-poly rather than always doing so. A bit less optimal from their point of view, but more playable from our point.
Dequipping items using drag-and-drop leaves the cursor at the source position, not the end position, as the end position isn’t where the item ends up anyways.
Verb List in the Command Menu now named Command Menu to be more clear. (Grothias)
Keybinding for the Command Menu, ‘V’, added, so you can restore your Command Menu if you drag it off without doing a full reset. (Grothias)
ActionBar settings should now be properly reset on every version upgrade, avoiding the embarassing bad settings seen in the 098->099 upgrade. (Richard Quirk)
FullScreen option changes to Windowed when you are already in Full Screen. (Kantaphon Tongmee)
Identify spell allows you to use the stylus to select an item.
Top row of ActionBar is mapped to F1-F15 on SDL platforms. (I don’t have a machine with F13-F15, so can’t confirm if they work) (David Damerell)
Top action bar shows up when in cast or command menu mode even if action bar is disabled. This is because it allows you to assign your F1-F15 keys.
Pressing F1-F15 during Command Menu or Zap screens will bind your current command/spell to the relevant slot, so there is no need to invoke your mouse.
Soul Suckers will properly target you when you are more than one square away.
When you look around with the stylus you will no longer replicate your original overlay icon. (Richard Quirk)
[DS] When I made [X] and [Y] remappable, I also accidentally swapped their meaning. Since the swap was done in the last month while the original meaning was around for 10 months, I’ve decided to swap them back. This means [X] is now Verb List, or [Start] equivalent, and [Y] is Inventory or [Select] alias. The rational is that the relative location of [X] and [Y] line up with [Start] and [Select] If you grew used to the swapped version, remember that you can remap them back by hitting [Select] in the Command Menu. (Matthew Rollins)
The Dip and Identify menus require you to chose a Checkbox or X button rather than just picking what you click on first. This allows you to explore your items with the stylus to figure out what you want to act on.
Moved the help icon to the top left which, thanks to the keyboard shortcuts, means hitting F1 gives you help.
Having a custom tileset will no longer cause you to revert to the classic tileset after ever load. (Matthew Rollins)
One new room.
Linux .tar.gz extracts into a powderXYZ directory rather than to the current directory, better matching the expectations of people on that platform.
Windows, DS, and GBA users now have a .zip format since .tar.gz can be hard to figure out on Windows platforms.

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

Kyoufu Kawa released another small technical demo for the Gameboy Advance.

Release notes:

The kind of multi-part sprites like in the old Sonic games where a single character of non-hardware-native size is built up from several smaller sprites.

http://helmetedrodent.kickassgamers.com/animdemo.rar

This displays a robot dude built up from varying amounts of loose parts.

I have the groundwork for a sprite assembly editor down already but I’m not developing it unless you think this is interesting.

What you could do is define an actor struct that holds the character’s X/Y coordinates and some kind of pointer to his sprite data.

http://forum.gbadev.org/viewtopic.php?t=14878

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.

Release notes:

Most of my effort has focussed on UI related issues with this release. My vision for the Action Bar is now realized. You can populate it with your own choice of actions or spells.

Akoi Meexx has been working extremely hard at a total-conversion tileset for POWDER which I’m proud to now make the default tileset!

I’ve moved my primary playing platform to the DS. I’m extremely happy with the current stylus interface. I have not had to use the buttons at all. This is fortunate as in the winter one can use the stylus with gloves, but I’ve had issues trying to use the buttons.

Changes:

The PPC Mac and Linux versions will no longer have psychedelic colours, but instead look normal. (Ben Hjelt)
[Mac] The Mac port now uses a .dmg making installation a snap! Note your .txt and .sav files will be saved to whatever directory you put the POWDER program into.
[SDL] The window icon was accidentally half brightness – it is now in its full glory.
There is now an action bar along the top of the screen as well. Further, you can reassign action bar entries when in the verb screen. Merely drag and drop to until the bar matches your dream layout!
There is now actionbars on the left and right of the screen. It is recommended you don’t use the top few of these as they will obscure your text output.
Your action bar settings are saved across sessions. If you mess things up, the Options menu has a Defaults entry that will revert them to the defaults.
From the Zap menu you can drag and drop spells to the action bar. This lets you cast specific spells with a single click.
On reading a spell or skill book, you will be given the full text of the spell or skill you are trying to learn. You will then have to confirm your selection. This requires two extra button pushes, but I hope such learning is rare and this helps people discover the spell text as [Select] is a tad bit obscure.
The background for the inventory screen has been changed into a series of boxes rather than the odd C symbol. This is also done on the layer beneath the items.
When you possess another creature and equip items, your original body will no longer mirror your new weapon choices.
Renaming yourself will change your actual name (the one for the win screen and character dump) rather than just your body’s name. (Grothias)
Linux port is now statically linked against libstdc++, so those of you who don’t have old libraries installed should be able to run it. (Martin Read, John Overmars)
The final inventory screen will no longer go to full-examine when you click on an item. Instead, it acts like the normal inventory where it does the short description on click and changes the item bar to reflect whether you can view the item. Similarly, the only way to quit it is to now press the inventory button again. (Or [B], of course) (Honourable mention to Richard Quirk who submitted a patch for this after I had already coded it)
Possess now takes Diagnose as a prerequisite.
The haunted island and other similar rooms that have monsters have been double checked to ensure they don’t allow stairs. (Martin Read)
[DS] Richard Quirk finished the earlier fix to support r21 of devkitPro. It turns out my refusal to use short-enums was the source of the incompatibility.
Requesting info (‘i’ or [Select]) on the cancel option of a spell book reading menu will no longer crash. (Ciaran Walsh)
You can drag items around your inventory screen to reorder them. You can drag into your equip slots to put them on or drag off equipped slots to remove them. (Richard Quirk)
it’s to its correction in cockatrice description. (Richard Quirk)
Eating items now grants ten times the foodvalue, bringing them more in line with eating corpses. (Brendan, Michal Bielinski)
One new map.
Brand new tileset – the Akoi Meexx tileset. This is a total conversion which has been made the new default tileset. Never fear, if you want the naked pink guy, you can change to the Classic tileset.

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

Goomba Color is a GBC emulator written for the GBA. Even though the GBA usually natively plays GBC games, Goomba Color provides the convenience to run multiple games from a flash cartridge, and also runs on the Nintendo DS and Game Boy Micro.

Changes:

* Fixed double speed timers mode
* Adds SGB borders to games which support both GBC and SGB mode
* Fixed controller input in SGB mode

http://www.dwedit.org/gba/goombacolor.php

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.

Changes:

“You are too big to swap” has two os in the first too. (David Damerell)
Many encyclopedia typo fixes. (David Damerell)
Wands that fizzle now conjugate “fizzle” according to the wand rather than the zapper.
When you learn the charges in a wand, there is no longer an incorrect article prefixing the wand name.
[DS] Now using devkitPro r21 rather than the hybridized version. Thanks to Richard Quirk for finding the work around and sending me code.
[DS] Thanks to Richard Quirk’s patch, POWDER should consume less power when waiting for a key press.
[DS], [SDL] Paged text will now show the background all the way to the edges of the window rather than being cut off at the GBA’s resolution.
When items teleported, their location in the map array wasn’t being updated, allowing them to be potentially accessed after being deleted.
Cancelling autopickup after already picking one item up when there is a thing to eat no longer causes you to eat said thing. And, incidentally, potentially killing you if said thing was a slug corpse. (Brendan)
“The fighter foobar’s death” will now auto-capitalize Foobar.
[DS] Save locations are now specified with absolute paths so it doesn’t matter where the actual POWDER executable is. (Johnboy554)
[DS] The output of POWDER on the DS is saved to /data/powder. This is also used for reading – graphics tiles must now be in /data/powder/gfx. This should keep your flash card clean and (apparently) this matches the standard homebrew definition. If you want to keep your old highscores, move the POWDER.SAV into the aforementioned directory. (Phillip Conrad)
Backspace key on the virtual keyboard is a double key to accomadate the fact it is too compact. (David Hong)
Wearing multiple pieces of artifact armour with attack boni will increase your chance of doing an armour attack. This means it is beneficial to add more attack armour rather than it only being wise to only equip the most powerful.
bmp2c and bmp.cpp both now properly handle non-Intel endianness. (Ben Hjelt)
Icons are now present on SDL builds and in the windows .exe. I also think that, thanks to Richard Quirk’s help, they’ll be present in the DS in Moonshell, but I haven’t been able to verify.
A wand once again crumbles into dust rather than crumble.
An interesting graphical upgrade. Monsters and items are now on a separate layer from the terrain. This means they can be drawn transparently on top rather than always being black bordered. This is made optional as the default tiles are not optimized for this look – you can turn it on with the Opacity option of the Options menu.
One more room.

Thanks to cid2mizard / http://www.dev-fr.org for the news.

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

Goomba Color is a GBC emulator written for the GBA. Even though the GBA usually natively plays GBC games, Goomba Color provides the convenience to run multiple games from a flash cartridge, and also runs on the Nintendo DS and Game Boy Micro.

http://www.dwedit.org/gba/goombacolor.php