BITS 2004 is a little demo/intro with 3 parts to show the capabilities of sprites, layers and sound on the GBA.

Thanks to Herman Samso, the author himself, for the news. His official page is located at http://bits.atari.org

http://pdroms.de/files/2260/

Holy Hell is a puzzle game with shmup elements. The goal of the game is to reach the end of every level trying to chain more blocks of the same color together.

You guide a little ship powered with four different colored weapons. Every weapon can destroy only blocks of its same color, so you must switch between them to blow up everything…

Brown blocks cannot be destroyed and must be dodged…

Changes:

– blocks movement now works perfectly
– added charge bar which charge megabomb by absorbing blocks
– when charge bar is full you can release megabomb with R which delete any blocks at screen of the same colour of you without breaking chain count
– chain count increase shooting always at the same colour blocks, using absorbing ability and bombs for reach blocks that you can’t shoot.
reached 100 chain it reset itself and add 1000 pt. at the score.
– no of colours you can choose grows up any 10 levels (you start with the possibility of switching only between green and cyan, after ten levels you switch green-cyan-red and so on…)
– smooth animation
– reduced drastically slow down
– general big optimization

Thanks to http://www.nintendomax.com/index.php?topic_id=10761 for the news.

http://forum.gbadev.org/viewtopic.php?t=16917

SynthGBA – A Gameboy Advance Synthesizer

Quote from wollw:

I started working on this project to help learn ARM Assembly and I ended up putting more effort into it than I intended. It’s a four octave synth that can play any major or minor scale that starts on the third through sixth octave. It isn’t anything fancy as it just maps the keys to the notes of the scale and lets you play but I’ve found it fun to play around with.

If you’re interested in playing around with it you can download it and its source code here.

The source code is a bit of a mess but I really don’t want to clean it up at the moment. For what it’s worth it does run in No$GBA with no errors.

Thanks to http://www.nintendomax.com/index.php?topic_id=10791 for the news.

http://forum.gbadev.org/viewtopic.php?t=16948

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:

Your tame creatures now have a heart badge beside them to identify them as such.
Switching to a different tile res will no longer cause a crash. (Inu)
Building the tile choice list now comes from the internal allbitmaps.h rather than being hardcoded, so Ibson the Grey’s tiles will show up as expected. (Inu)
Entering a level with active lava/water from a level which has no active lava/water, when the new level is already created and previously visited this game, will no longer stop the updating of said lava and water. (Nathan Bogue)
Hopefully backspace will work on OSX. (Nathan Bogue)
Jumping in space prohibited if you lack spacewalk. (Nathan Bogue)
Jumping when buried prohibited. (Nathan Bogue)
Kobold thieves are pluralized properly. (Nathan Bogue)
Living frosts are now bloodless. (Nathan Bogue)
Digging upwards on special levels has more sensible results. (Nathan Bogue)
Remove the console window on Windows.
Shattered trees will drop their occupants. (Nathan Bogue)
Items that fall down holes will no longer be mapped. (patch by Richard Quirk)
PSP Makefile should be happier with newer devkits. (patch by Joe Buck)
Left and Right on menus will scroll fast, just like L and R do, but this also applies to the command menu where L and R are the quick bind keys. (patch by Joe Buck)
[SDL] Shift-arrow will swap with a critter, Alt-arrow will jump. (patch by Andreas Bohm)
ctype.h is included in map2c.cpp now. (Ben Hjelt)
New tileset from Chris Lomaka.
One new room.
Load game shows up first in the menu if it is available to make it harder to accidentally choose new game. (Enrique Garcia Cota)

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

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

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

Sonic AS is a music player for Nintendo DS and GBA.

Changes:

– DS runs with variable channel count (to allow stuff like libnds sound)
– GBA mixer code has been heavily optimized
– Music code has been revised
– Fixed pitch bend stuff
– Added SFX code

Thanks to www.nintendomax.com for the news.

http://forum.gbadev.org/viewtopic.php?t=16894

Goomba is a Gameboy emulator for the Gameboy Advance. Beyond the advantage of being able to store many games on one cart, Goomba also includes save states and customizable borders. At least, Kuwanger’s fork does. Also available are many palettes, along with the ability to make your own.

Release notes:

2009-10-21 – Support up to 256 borders and 256 palettes. Adds a list for border/palette selection (modification of Dwedit’s list in Goomba Color).

http://kuwanger.net/gba/goomba/

Goomba is a Gameboy emulator for the Gameboy Advance. Beyond the advantage of being able to store many games on one cart, Goomba also includes save states and customizable borders. At least, Kuwanger’s fork does. Also available are many palettes, along with the ability to make your own.

Release notes:

Goomba Paletted v2.37 – 2009-10-18 – Changed border format to support more tiles. Adds Super Gameboy Borders, dumped by Asaki.

http://kuwanger.net/gba/goomba/

Goomba is a Gameboy emulator for the Gameboy Advance. Beyond the advantage of being able to store many games on one cart, Goomba also includes save states and customizable borders. At least, Kuwanger’s fork does. Also available are many palettes, along with the ability to make your own.

Release notes:

This is mostly a repost of v2.36rc1. It has a few modifications, to better reset for the Supercard. This means exit should work properly under Supercard, EZ4, and F2A. Saves should also function properly under EZ4 and F2A without any patching.

Also included is Asaki’s mix of the Gameboy Color palettes.

Discussion: http://www.pocketheaven.com/boards/viewtopic.php?t=7062

http://www.kuwanger.net/gba/goomba/

genecyst has updated his game “Holy Hell” and let us know about this via the PDRoms webboard.

Holy Hell is a puzzle game with shmup elements. The goal of the game is to reach the end of every level trying to chain more blocks of the same color together.

You guide a little ship powered with four different colored weapons. Every weapon can destroy only blocks of its same color, so you must switch between them to blow up everything…

Brown blocks cannot be destroyed and must be dodged…

Changes:

– 37 levels
– speed increase every 5 levels

http://pdroms.de/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=6574

Jess Ragan has updated his Gameboy Advance version of the game Gorf.

From Wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorf ):

Gorf is an arcade game released in 1981 by Midway Mfg., whose name was advertised as an acronym for “Galactic Orbiting Robot Force”. It is a multiple-mission fixed shooter with five distinct modes of play, essentially making it five games in one. It is well-known for its use of synthesized speech, a new feature at the time.

Gorf’s objective is simply to destroy all enemies. The player controls a spaceship that can move slowly left, right, up and down.

Release notes:

* JESS RETHINKS: You know, now that GORF is finished (for good this time, seriously), I’m thinking about turning my attention toward Awesome NES, which hasn’t been updated in a dog’s age. I’m not sure what a dog’s age is, exactly, but let’s say for the sake of argument that it’s about four months and some change. I also should look into keeping at least a few of the promises I made earlier in the year. Since this is 2009, just a hair’s breadth away from the next decade, there’s really no point in procrastinating on an Assault of the Invaders update.

http://www.lakupo.com/grblitz/