Popular, cheap, and reverse-engineered by an active homebrew community, the Game Boy Advance makes a pretty sweet introduction to hacking embedded systems. In this series of classes we'll learn how to make our own video games on the system and take advantage of the hardware features of the GBA to let us incorporate the system into projects that go far beyond the scope of video games alone.

Setting Up
In order to start programming on the Game Boy Advance, you're going to need a toolchain for the platform, and an emulator to run your code quickly without the need for the system itself. For the toolchain, devkitARM is the best one out there, and what will be used in this class. As far as emulators go, you can try out VisualBoyAdvance for most any platform, or no$gba for Windows (and in Linux under Wine).

For Ubuntu Linux users, there is a phenomenal thread in the Ubuntu forums that shows how to set up a complete GBA/Nintendo DS development environment with a nice script to boot, props to the forum member louman for making such a nice HOWTO. For those of you who don't have an Ubuntu forum account, or don't care to login just to download a file, here's a link to a local copy of the script.

At this point, feel free to look through the uploaded example code from the lessons below.

Code & Slides
Introduction - 9/12/2009

Videos (Coming Soon)

Resources
TONC
GBATEK
gbadev