Invoking make Contents Log

F. References and links

F.1. General sites

F.1.1. Essentials

F.1.2. Alternative dev environments

F.1.3. Personal sites

A few sites of (high-ranked) forum-dwellers. These guys have been around for a while and you can learn a lot from playing their demos and browsing through their source code.

F.2. Documents

F.2.1. Tutorials

F.2.2. Reference documents

F.2.3. ARM docs

Naturally, the ARM site itself also has useful documents. Note that most of these are pdfs.


F.3. Tools

F.3.1. Source code tools

If you're still using Notepad to write your GBA code, don't. Do yourself a favor and just … don't, OK? Though I personally use Visual C for writing code, there are some other very nice tools for the job, both in terms of general text editors as IDEs.

F.3.2. Graphics tools

Just as Notepad sucks for coding (and anything apart from the simplest text editing), MS-Paint is hell on Earth when it comes to the kind of graphics you need in GBA games. What you need is a tool that allows full control over the bitmap's palette, and MS-Paint fails spectacularly in that respect. So, I might add, does Visual C's native bitmap editor. And even big and bulky photo-editing tools like PhotoShop and Paint Shop Pro have difficulty here, or so I'm told. So here are some tools that do allow the kind of control that you need. Whatever tool you plan on using: make sure it doesn't screw up the palette! Some editors are known to throw entries around.

F.3.3. Map Editors

While the maps that I've used in Tonc were created on the fly, for any serious work you need a map editor. Here are a few.

F.3.4. Misc tools

F.4. Books


Modified Mar 13, 2008, J Vijn. Get all Tonc files here