GBA Mario Bros Remake
This assessment was supposed to challenge my knowledge on low level programming, working with memory addresses and directly interacting with hardware; something I haven’t delved into before. I won’t lie, every step of the way though this project was difficult and frustrating however I feel like I have come out a stronger, more knowledgeable programmer because of it.
This project has taught me a lot about optimization due in many ways due to the low processing power of the GameBoy Advance and really makes me appreciate how much you can get away with on modern systems.
Debugging on the GBA is almost non-existent, only the NO$GBA Debugger emulator allows for it and even then it’s only in ASM. Of course this made the development process difficult because every error was displayed as “Error code 2”. Despite this during the end of the development process I seemed to start to fall into a flow where I wouldn’t even need the error codes anymore as I had gained a deeper understanding of the compiler and the common errors I would face.
Of course some errors I had were more difficult that others and some were ‘unfixable’, luckily for me at moments like those I could scout my peers for anyone who was also stuck and sort of trade our errors “I’ll fix yours if you fix mine”.