SHshepmaster·Apr 21, 2022
In Rust9x: Compile Rust code for Windows 95, NT and aboverust-console
gba
Rust2018–2022
rust-console / gba
gba
A crate that helps you make GBA games
5Distinct people
7Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
730GitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
A crate that helps you make GBA games
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 12:54:37 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year7 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2018-12-13 16:27:03 UTC to 2022-04-21 23:52:00 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
7 sourcesThere is a rust port for the game boy advance https://github.com/rust-console/gba
In RBoy: A Gameboy Emulator in RustGba: Crate that helps you make GBA games in Rust
2 points · Open discussionA fun alternative way to play with Rust on bare-metal, is https://github.com/rust-console/gba, which is a Rust crate for writing (unavoidably bare-metal) homebrew for the Gameboy Advance.
See the second half of https://rust-console.github.io/gba/bitmap-video.html for an example of what code using the gba crate looks like.
Tangent: IMHO, the GBA is a nearly-perfect platform to get started with bare-metal programming on. It's not painfully-constrained like the 8-bit micros of old, but it doesn't have any extra layers of abstraction like virtual memory, either. Plus, multimedia IO (drawing to the screen, playing sounds, reading buttons) are all just banging bits, similar to using POKEs in BASIC on an Apple II, which makes for immediate gratification, important for younger learners. And you can run GBA software through emulation on pretty muc
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h any device you own; with there being some excellent visual debuggers available as well for Windows/Linux.
I would like to take this chance to mention the excellent https://github.com/rust-console/gba crate, which is a very useful zero-cost Rust abstraction layer you can use instead of the C compiler in the devkitPro GBA toolchain (and would be especially good for programming systems things like emulators, for the GBA.)
If you have some low-level C knowledge, but have never seen bare-metal programming done in Rust, it’s really quite a difference in approach; despite your statements compiling down to banging physical memory pointers and MMIO registers together, it feels quite safe—with a proper library helping you out, it becomes quite hard to put the system into a wedged state, for no runtime cost. You can’t even put bitflag registers into invalid states!
In Fantasy console on a consoleIt's not really "less constrained" in any way that matters, though. Sure, you can write more than 8K of Lua and the display resolution is a bit wider, but you don't get a dedicated DSP+sequencer for audio, multiple graphics layers with affine transforms/color math, SRAM(!), a real-time clock, etc. I can't even build a Tamagotchi with this ;)
In other words, for my needs, TIC-80 is still entirely dominated by just using https://github.com/rust-console/gba to write GBA homebrew in Rust. (And everything has a GBA emulator. Everything!)
A viable PICO-16 platform, to me, would have to offer a clear improvement over the "GBA homebrew in Rust" solution.
(Even if all it is, come to think of it, is the GBA's ARM7TDMI ISA extended with some more hardware registers and instructions, and a PICO-8-like IDE for building those "GBA+" ROMs. Such an appro
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ach would come with the benefit that you could build a PICO-16 runtime by just starting with a GBA emulator and adding features. You could even choose encodings for the new ops such that they would look like NOPs to old GBA emulators, making PICO-16 "GBA+" ROMs gracefully degrade into regular GBA ROMs when run on a regular GBA emulator—very much like how Gameboy Color games work, or how SNES ROMhacks and homebrew support the MSU-1 audio chip.)