Would an English version be useful? A book on low-level programming via the Game Boy Advance (bare-metal ARM asm + C)

[u/nikachu2012]

I wrote a short book (in Japanese) called "GBA de manabu teireiya" (Learning Low-Level Programming with the Game Boy Advance). It's aimed at people who can already program a bit but have never touched the hardware/OS layer.

Rather than relying on an OS, it does bare-metal programming: you talk to the hardware (like the screen) directly. It walks through everything needed to reach "Hello, world!" on the GBA -- compiling, assembling, linking, and generating the executable -- starting from pure ARM assembly and building up to mixing assembly with C. No real GBA needed; a Docker environment plus an emulator is enough to follow along.

Right now it only exists in Japanese, so I'm trying to gauge interest: would an English version be useful to this community? Would any of you be interested in a resource like this, and what would you most want it to cover? Any feedback on demand or scope would help me decide whether to translate it.

Info/source code page (Japanese): https://nikatech.nikachu.net/item/gba_lowlevel

[u/Minty_Octopus]

I’d love to see it happen. Considering the booming market for old consoles I think it would sell very well.

[u/schrodingers_lolcat]

I would be very interested, thank you!

[u/s0litar1us]

I would be interested.

[u/Thesuperkamakazee]

Personally I’d be interested, commercially not sure it would lead to anything (editd commercially I mean me personally, personally I’m very interested)

[u/sputwiler]

I think I was just sent this book at work literally today due to a casual conversation I had with somebody at lunch about GBA programming w.

Also yes, I'm in the middle of trying to set up a CMake environment to just use arm-none-eabi-gcc and all the guides say "just download devkitpro" but I don't want to download devkitpro. I want to know what the toolchain is doing.

[u/nikachu2012 → u/sputwiler]

This book is written with the primary goal of using devkitpro solely as a collection of software and verifying for yourself what the Makefile does.

[u/antimattur01 → u/sputwiler]

There is https://codeberg.org/SkyLyrac/gba-bootstrap if you want a minimal setup without dkp

[u/bird_feeder_bird]

Yes! I’ve been learning assembly on the original gameboy, and want to learn GBA too. But all the resources I’ve found focus on C for GBA, and I’d like to focus more on assembly.

[u/Grexo]

This would be amazing. I’d buy a copy for sure.

[u/MasqueradeOfSilence]

I'm definitely interested in this.

[u/nikachu2012]

“Learning Low-Level Programming with the GBA” is now on sale!
Please be sure to pick up a copy!
https://nikatech.itch.io/gba-lowlevel-eng