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67 lines
3.1 KiB
Markdown
67 lines
3.1 KiB
Markdown
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# Help and Resources
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## Help
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So you're stuck on a problem and the book doesn't say what to do. Where can you
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find out more?
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The first place I would suggest is the [Rust Community
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Discord](https://discordapp.com/invite/aVESxV8). If it's a general Rust question
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then you can ask anyone in any channel you feel is appropriate. If it's GBA
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specific then you can try asking me (`Lokathor`) or `Ketsuban` in the `#gamedev`
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channel.
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## Emulators
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You certainly might want to eventually write a game that you can put on a flash
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cart and play on real hardware, but for most of your development you'll probably
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want to be using an emulator for testing, because you don't have to fiddle with
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cables and all that.
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In terms of emulators, you want to be using
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[mGBA](https://github.com/mgba-emu/mgba), and you want to be using the [0.7 Beta
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1](https://github.com/mgba-emu/mgba/releases/tag/0.7-b1) or later. This update
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lets you run raw ELF files, which means that you can have full debug symbols
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available while you're debugging problems.
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## Information Resources
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Ketsuban and I didn't magically learn this all from nowhere, we read various
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technical manuals and guides ourselves and then distilled the knowledge (usually
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oriented towards C and C++) into this book for Rust.
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We have personally used some or all of the following:
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* [GBATEK](http://problemkaputt.de/gbatek.htm): This is _the_ resource. It
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covers not only the GBA, but also the DS and DSi, and also a run down of ARM
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assembly (32-bit and 16-bit opcodes). The link there is to the 2.9b version on
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`problemkaputt.de` (the official home of the document), but if you just google
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for gbatek the top result is for the 2.5 version on `akkit.org`, so make sure
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you're looking at the newest version. Sometimes `problemkaputt.de` is a little
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sluggish so I've also [mirrored](https://lokathor.com/gbatek.html) the 2.9b
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version on my own site as well. GBATEK is rather large, over 2mb of text, so
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if you're on a phone or similar you might want to save an offline copy to go
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easy on your data usage.
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* [TONC](https://www.coranac.com/tonc/text/): While GBATEK is basically just a
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huge tech specification, TONC is an actual _guide_ on how to make sense of the
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GBA's abilities and organize it into a game. It's written for C of course, but
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it's a large
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* [CowBite](https://www.cs.rit.edu/~tjh8300/CowBite/CowBiteSpec.htm): This is
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more like GBATEK, and it's less complete, but it mixes in a little more
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friendly explanation of things in between the hardware spec parts.
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And I haven't had time to look at it myself, [The Audio
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Advance](http://belogic.com/gba/) seems to be very good. It explains in depth
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how you can get audio working on the GBA. Note that the table of contents for
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each page goes along the top instead of down the side.
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## Non-Rust GBA Community
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There's also the [GBADev.org](http://www.gbadev.org/) site, which has a forum
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and everything. They're coding in C and C++, but you can probably overcome that
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difference with a little work on your part.
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I also found a place called
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[GBATemp](https://gbatemp.net/categories/nintendo-gba-discussions.32/), which
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seems to have a more active forum but less of a focus on actual coding.
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