I got my first Game Boy Advance back in 2001 this was years before smartphones YouTube and social media and at that time the GBA was the most entertainment you could take with you anywhere you go a few years ago I figured out how to program my own simple GBA programs in Games that actually run on the original hardware I’ll try to make a step-by-step tutorial video if anyone out there is interested but then someone suggested I make Minecraft for the GBA and then another and another it’s just simple 3d boxes how hard could it be well very hard for me at least Writing code on the GBA really taught me the meaning of optimization for every single part of your code even simple for loops can cause visible scan lines on screen and the GBA was not meant for 3d graphics but you can draw a pixel on screen so that means that you can draw Three pixels on screen and horizontal lines to create polygons then use math to create perspective and sorting and well I’ll make an in-depth video on this 3d concept later and after working on this for a long time and rewriting code over and over I wanted to show you this Version one progress video and how far I’ve come so far I of course want to make it look better and I know it will never look as clean as the actual Minecraft but this is what I can get the GBA hardware to do so far And I want to explain that this is an actual GBA game every GBA game had a chip inside that held a dot GBA ROM file today you can buy cartridges that hold a dot GBA ROM file on an SD card that feeds the data through the pins in the Same way I found it extremely hard to film the GBA screen with my camera but you can see the program is running on the system but for the sake of your eyes I’m going to show you the same file running on the visual boy advance gba Emulator it has the same speed but is way easier to record to show you so what can it do in version 1 so far you can move around and look up and down in a 3d environment the ground is represented with dots and you can add a cube delete A cube change the color of the next cube and model anything you want I also added a way to display your creation by pressing a button to have the camera spin around Even while filming this I had a lot of fun thinking of what I could create next I have a few bugs to fix but do let me know in the comments if you like this and you want to try the game and let me know if you want to see more versions of This or at list other games that you want to see on the GBA textures are very expensive on the processor for the GBA but I know I can do it since I made simple textures working on my ray caster level creator a link to that will be in This video description the ray caster might look 3d but it’s actually more of a representation of a 2d top-down game but still this gives you an idea of the glorious low res texture pixelation I Want to thank you all for the suggestion this has been a very fun and rewarding project to work on please do let me know what else you might like to see and I am still working on 3d printing projects that I can’t wait to share with you so I Hope to see you again for those videos thank you all for your support and as always Video Information
This video, titled ‘GBA Minecraft | Pushing The GBA to the Limit’, was uploaded by 3DSage on 2019-01-31 14:58:19. It has garnered 1228046 views and 72090 likes. The duration of the video is 00:03:48 or 228 seconds.
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I have been teaching myself to program my own games for the Nintendo Gameboy Advance. I was challenged to program a simple 3D Minecraft style block building game on this old and slow console and it has been a fun and rewarding experience. I hope you like my progress so far and let me know if you want me to make more updates on this and please list a few other games you might like to see simplified down to the GBA! Thank you for watching!
