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Comment by ant6n | Hacker News Reader

GBA is very well documented (gbatek). The DS seems to be as well, but it's much harder to work with. GBA is much easier, but still powerful enough to do non trivial things without having to do them all in assembly. Emulator support is superb. Hardware adapters that allow you to load ROMs have been around forever.

I'd say it's one of the best systems to get into on-the-metal Homebrew.

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Much harder is a bit of a stretch IMO.

There’s more potential complexity if you want to do complex things and maybe 3D is hard (I’ve never done it) but the basics are about as straightforward.

I was intrigued about the 3D thing— a cool YouTube top 5 with some light commentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6QtoZcYhi4

Cool video—how was such fluid 3D achieved on the GBA hardware? Anyone know of any war story articles about developing 3D games on the GBA?

Low resolution combine with a decently fast processor means software rendering is entirely doable. It's a comparable situation to very early PC 3D gaming.

Just for the record, "decently fast" in this case is a 16 Mhz ARM 7.

It's especially crazy that a bunch of them look to be rendering legit polygon scenes— this isn't early nineties 2.5D titles like Doom and Wolf3d running on 486 PCs.

The ARM 7 is a pretty good processor, so it can get a lot done on 16 MHz. Quite a bit more than what an x86 of similar clock speed ever could.

Ok you could argue that’s more complex on the GBA.

I would argue otherwise; interfaces to other people’s stuff always are the most difficult parts of programming. When you do it yourself (3D projection etc.) it’s just you and reason and that’s not so bad.

Fair enough. Id say 3d and the two screens make it harder. Also memory latency and clock speed is somewhat more complex, what with the tightly coupled memory.

The limited amount of VRAM in the DS is the real issue. Even the lack of RAM is an issue.

4 MB RAM + 656 kB VRAM doesn't strike me as particularly memory constrained as someone who grew up with 4-64 kB systems. I guess it matters where you're coming from.

On top of that, DS cartridges are 8 - 512 MB.

I prefer the PSP for this purpose myself.

https://github.com/pspdev/psptoolchain

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