Your best GBA programming tutorials are at The Pern Project. Your best general purpose site for documents, sources, and that sort of thing is gbadev.org For audio programming, check out The Audio Advance. There are also a few articles here at gamedev, but they don't get into as much depth as you can find at other sites.

As for what language is used, most GBA apps are programmed in either C / C++ or Assembly, but there are a few other means available. Look around at gbadev for alternatives.

I'm not sure what you mean by "how are the thing functioning production wise," so I'll just take that opportunity for my general impression of GBA programming.

First off, it can be a lot harder than Windows programming, or any OS for that matter. That's just because, at least as a homebrew developer, you'll be working from the ground up, that is to say, with nothing but a list of registers. Unless you use someone else's code, you'll be writing all your graphic functions and everything else yourself so it can communicate with the hardware. However, that can also be good, from the point of view that then you'll know every bit of your code through and through, rather than having to dig through msdn for that weird function you never knew existed. Also in favor of GBA programming is the fact that it's designed for games, which means it's very easy to program tiled, multilayered maps, and to scale and rotate maps or sprites, and that sort of thing. Put simply, GBA programming is unusual compared to programming for a PC, so I'd say you should look through some tutorials to try to get a taste of how things go.

Feel free to ask any more questions you have.

[edit- added link to gamedev resources]

-Arek the Absolute

[edited by - Arek the Absolute on September 25, 2003 4:29:13 PM]

GBA! I''ve got a question too...

I think the machine is a master-piece and have wanted to make games for it - but from a industry point of view I was wondering if it is worth programming for...are there plenty of jobs for GBA programmers?

Are there many GBA developer companies in the UK? I''d sure like to hook up with one...

I've been programming on the GBA for several months now (as an independent programmer) and I've found that it's an amazingly simple and elegant system to program for. It's strange when you're not used to it, but because it's a system made for gaming it avoids a lot of the complex overhead code that you need in order to "transform" your PC into a game machine. The video system is really nice, sound is a bit tricky and I'm still getting that hang of that, and the only real problem I had with it is that it doesn't have a file system. So, I wrote a very basic one so that files can be loaded like real files and now everything is wonderful. Definitely check out www.gbadev.org. A really nice site. Also see www.devrs.com. They have a GBA section. Good luck!

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"Pointer?????"
-Anonymous

-=Xelius=-


[edited by - xelius on September 26, 2003 4:30:28 PM]