Here's a book that'll help you program in Rust on the Game Boy Advance (GBA).

It's a work in progress of course, but so is most of everything in Rust.

I'm out to teach you how to program in Rust on the GBA, obviously. However, while there is a gba crate, and while I genuinely believe it to be a good and useful crate for GBA programming, we will not be using the gba crate within this book. In fact we won't be using any crates at all. We can call it the Handmade Hero approach, if you like.

I don't want to just teach you how to use the gba crate, I want to teach you what you'd need to know to write the crate from scratch if it wasn't there.

Each chapter of the book will focus on a few things you'll need to know about GBA programming and then present a fully self-contained example that puts those ideas into action. Just one file per example, no dependencies, no external assets, no fuss. The examples will be in the text of the book within code blocks, but also you can find them in the examples directory of the repo if you want to get them that way.

I will try not to ask too much of the reader ahead of time, but you are expected to have already read The Rust Book. Having also read through the Rustonomicon is appreciated but not required.

It's very difficult to know when you've said something that someone else won't already know about, or if you're presenting ideas out of order. If things aren't clear please file an issue and we'll try to address it.

If you want to contact us you should join the Rust Community Discord and ask in the #gamedev channel.

• Ketsuban is the wizard who knows much more about how it all works
• Lokathor is the fool who decided to write a crate and book for it.

If it's not a GBA specific question then you can probably ask any of the other folks in the server as well (there's a few hundred folks).

If you want to read more about developing on the GBA there are some other good resources as well:

• TONC, a tutorial series written for C, but it's what I based the ordering of this book's sections on.
• GBATEK, a homebrew tech manual for GBA/NDS/DSi. We will regularly link to parts of it when talking about various bits of the GBA.
• Getting Something for Nothing by James Munns. RustConf 2018. It specifically talks about zero cost abstraction within an embedded rust context, which is exactly what we're all about.