The Rednex Gameboy Development System allows adept programmers to write software for the Nintendo Gameboy and Gameboy Colour using assembly language. The development system consists of an assembler, a multi-party linker, and a number of include files that lists registers. Hundreds of commercial Nintendo Gameboy & Gameboy Colour entertainment titles have been created with this system since it was first created.

The RGBDS (Rednex Gameboy Development System) development tools allow you to program the Nintendo Gameboy & Gameboy Colour hand held console. The package consists of an assembler, a linker, a library packager, an executable patch program, and a Bung cartridge transfer utility.

Best of all, it’s free! That’s right! Free! The executables are free to use, either for personal hobby use, or full blown commercial productions — I know of at least a dozen commercial games you can purchase that are written with RGBDS — and the source code is free to modify.

The only thing I ask is that you do not charge for either distributing the executables or source code, and any derivative works you give credit to the original authors of the tools. That means you have to say “Thanks” to the original authors SurfSmurf and Otaku.

The assembler is constantly being updated and improved. It is currently written in the ‘C’ language and makes use of Bison for parsing.

ADDITIONAL INFO

I’m experimenting with moving the RGBDS tool chain to Java. The benefit of using Java would be to enable separate CPU modules to be dynamically loaded at run-time with no recompilation of the assembler executable. A simple command-line switch could take care of it. There would also only be one version of each “executable” that would need to be distributed for all supported platforms.

The RGBFIX tool is now completely re-written in Java. As I haven’t had much opportunity to experiment with distributing a Java “executable package” on multiple platforms recently I’m just going to leave this one as a Win32 executable and the accompanying class & source files.

DOWNLOAD

RGBASM Executable (Win32/zipped) v1.11

XLINK Executable (Win32/zipped) v1.08d

XLIB Executable (Win32/zipped)

RGBFIX Executable (Win32/zipped) v1.05

RGBDS package (Win32/zipped) v1.10e (not latest version)

RGBDS source (zipped)

RGBDS Documentation (zipped)

RGBDS Documentation (on-line)

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