Lil' GBA thing I made

During the last few months/weeks I have been trying, in conjunction with the illustrious Greatsaintlouis, to come up with an entry for the GBAX2005 coding compo, and decided on making a little shmup game. However, due to time constraints, finals, alcohol (and related illness) I have been unable to enter it into the contest, but I still intend to keep coding on it.
I felt I should provide you with an early version

fly6.gba

Press A to shoot and B to spawn enemies. One enemy is spawned by default which looks the same as the player ship and is set to follow you and shoot, the others just move offscreen. I know it isn't much in terms of gameplay but it's my first GBA project so I'm happy with it (also, it's 100% assembly, of course ;-) )

 

I broked it...

 

You mean, it crashed? Argh, i've been debugging for hours lately...

 

D'oh! I uploaded the wrong version. Should work now.

 

And what's the great masterplan for the future ?

 

Not sure, going to add levels and stuff, this is just the very basic engine with some artwork inserted.

 

Good Start Anti!.......would be great to see a living history of the problems and thoughts you have as you develop it in the future.... (i.e. how you approached collision detection, how you got started on music etc..) when it all happens of course....


Keep it up!...(so to speak)...

 

What does it run best on?

I'm guessing it runs on a P.C emu of some kind as all I get is a black screen when its on a flash cart / GBsp.

 

Aargh, the dreaded "doesnt work on real hardware" problem
I use VisualBoy Advance for testing, but I hoped it would run from flash carts as well. Does it show anything at all?

 

Nope, it shows nothing, not even a flash of light.

...I'll try it on VisualBoy Advance.

 

VisualBoy Advance has been my platform of choice for testing and debugging. Sadly, neither Anti nor myself can afford flashcarts, so we've not been able to test it at all on real hardware.

 

Though I suppose I could haxx0r it to run with a Multiboot cable, I have one of those actually but I'm too lazy to change the whole code structure around.

 

What are you two using for development software? I am going to be taking a "Software Design for Handheld Devices" course in the spring. I am hoping that it will give me time to play around with GBA programming.

 

For the code, I use the goldroad assembler v1.7. Not the most widely used tool, but fine for me, and I'm severely traumatized from compiling cross-compilers so this was the quick path to the Dark Side ;-)
I convert gfx using Usenti, or sometimes by hand, in the case of small sprites/tiles.

 

D'oh! Apparently the routine that randomly places the clouds on the background is doing a lot of unaligned reading and writing... I'll fix it ASAP, and if you would be so kind to try again I would be most grateful :smt045

 

Brilliant, as soon as you post an updated version I'll give it a go m8.

:smt045

 

Anti's the main coder, I just provide the lackluster graphics (but no, the clouds weren't mine) when I find time. The brunt of the effort has all been on his shoulders.

 

Heh, the clouds were so simple I typed them directly as hex values
And I've attached an update version, had to add in one instruction to clear the lower bit of the address lol

 

Still looking forward to a coded ver that runs on a cart...

...Updated ver still black screens which I guess is intentional.

 

What? Damn, I thought I fixed it, VBA's logger doesnt display any alignment errors.