/BERGASMS/GBA/01

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01/08/22: Part 1

So, I have a simple concept for a game I want to execute. The game jam goes for months and it's not an ambitious idea, it won't win the prize, but i will be happy if I can execute it from start to finish. It's based on the OG video game, tennis for two (or pong, i guess). How original!!!
So a talk about the setup. I ordered a flash cart which should arrive soon, this will let me run the game on the actual device. This is super important because a valuable piece of experience I have gained from mobile app development is that simulators and emulators are no substitute for hardware. Now, I just have to dig out my actual GBA from the shed, otherwise I will need to find a device as well.
I am going to use Zig because it is a nifty little programming language. I had some exposure to it back when it was in version 0.7 and it has changed wildly already up to version 0.10 so I am excited to get back to grips with it. For my IDE I will be using vim, mostly because I am a masochist it's really cool once you learn how to use it and has saved my butt on a number of times repairing broken XCode .pbxproj files (I am sadly very talented in this area).
I will be using the mGBA emulator when not using physical hardware. It seems to be pretty good, I have managed to get a 'hello pixel' example running on it using the ZigGBA library so i guess I know it can be made to work.
Now to step 1. Despite having a perfectly good library available to get pixels onto the screen I am not going to be using that. I want to really learn how the GBA works so I am going to do all the hard stuff myself. So the first goal is.

I will write the bare minimum amount of code to display a red pixel onto the GBA screen using Zig

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