GBA + FPC = Possiblility???

[WILL]

Well, I am currious... those of you that use FPC... would you be interested in Game Boy Advance development if it becomes a reality?

I see it as a great oppertunity to get into hard core game development as it's all 2D, really (no built-in 3D graphics hardware). And the CPU it's self is built for just raw power. It's old-school game programing at it's best. And it's very popular right now, plus it's portable. What more could you want for your game releases? It may be an 'in' for aspiring indie-game developers.

[cairnswm]

I suppose it could be interesting. I just dont have a GBA... And I dont really see the point of getting myself one - except I suppose if I could write games for it

[Legolas]

Unfortunately Nintendo don't allows to sell indie projects, AFAIK... It need to be an official Nintendo developer. Except that, I tried some times ago to work with gba-gcc and it's pretty easy to make a simple game.

[savage]

Almost anything that advances the Pascal game development community, in general, should be a Good Thang ( tm ).

My son has a GBA so I could tell him he's been bad and "conficate" it for R&D . I am kidding of course.

Also it does not matter if you do not have a GBA, as you can use various GBA Emulators ( like http://sdlemu.ngemu.com/basdl.php ) to test out your Pascal GBA code before having to test it on a real GBA.

I would give it a try if an FPC/GBA port was available.

[FPK]

Adding a new target to FPC is no problem. However, as far as I can see, the GBA requires the usage of the thumb arm instruction set which is a reduced instruction set which isn't supported by FPC yet. If there is a real interest, the support of this instruction set can be added of course.

[WILL]

How can we show support FPK? I can count at least 5 people that want to be able to do this without thinking, right now all by name from this board alone.

We even have 1 member that is actively trying to get something together for it aswell. See this thread http://www.pascalgamedevelopment.com...pic.php?t=1621

[cairnswm]

FPK - how about windows mobile on the Smartphone!!!!

I've got the Motorola MPX200 and would be quite willing to help get it working - OK more than willing as it means I dont need to learn Imbedded VB or C++

[Traveler]

Well to behonest, making games for pc (windows or linux for that matter) is already difficult enough. (For me anyways). And as "aspiring indie-game developer" i'd rather stick to this platform.

In my opinion its nice to see the possibilties for creating games on different platforms is growing, but I would be more pleased if we actually get to see more finished games.

[Lightning]

Well guys, in case you don't know that, FPK made the FPC compiler
There is nothing he can't do, but he probably needs some hardware and many people to use that compiler i already talked to him about SmartPhone(Symbian+ARM) on #fpc you can contact him there but he doesn't have much time, always talking about technical stuff :lol:

[noeska]

I think al that is needed on how to modify free pascal for the gba is written here: http://linux.gbadev.org/gcc-gba/ .

The important part is crt0.s as this defines the gba (cartridge/executable) header. But even more improtant is the lnkscript that is used. As that glues together the crt0.o with your applicton .o file in a special way. Without that linked in to the executable nothing is going to work.

For direct memory access on the gba i believe pointername := pointer(memoryaddress) is possible. So using pure pascal code it should be possible to change graphics mode and write to video memory etc.

Thumb assembly is the least of the concerns to get things working, more important is pointing a pointer to a specific memory address as written above. PS i believe it possible (even on a gba) to switch between thumb and arm assembly...