Thursday, May 17, 2018

Game Boy Advance Development 101: Compiling Tank Advance

If you've happen to download Tank Advance source code from Loirak Development, chances are you're having a problem compiling a working GBA file with devkitPro.


That's because of the compiler.


The pre-compiled GBA file inside the Tank Advance ZIP file was compiled 2002 -- that's more than a decade and a half.  Last 2002, GCC was just version 3.  As of this writing, devkitPro is using GCC version 7.


Without much further ado, use the following lines in MSYS2:
arm-none-eabi-gcc -c gfx.c -mthumb-interwork -mthumb -O2 -o gfx.o
arm-none-eabi-gcc -c main.c -mthumb-interwork -mthumb -O2 -o main.o
arm-none-eabi-gcc main.o gfx.o -mthumb-interwork -mthumb -specs=gba.specs -o tank.elf
arm-none-eabi-objcopy -v -O binary tank.elf tank.gba



If successful, you should have a freshly compiled Tank Advance and you can start changing the code to understand how it works so you can start writing your own Game Boy Advance game. :)


Happy GBA deving!


~creek23

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