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Introduction
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.
Style and Purpose
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.
Expected Knowledge
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.
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.
Getting Help
If you want to contact us you should join the Rust Community
Discord and ask in the #gamedev
channel.
Ketsubanis the wizard who knows much more about how it all worksLokathoris 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).
Further Reading
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.
- CowBite is another tech specification that's more GBA specific. It's sometimes got more ASCII art diagrams and example C struct layouts than GBATEK does.