[Epilepsy trigger warning – weird repeating pattern gif at the bottom of this post]

That sprite work yesterday got me pumped up on my own sense of achievement, so I confess that after posting last night I leapt right into playing with backgrounds. There was an equally straightforward tutorial. I’ll just make a little tile and shove it behind my little speaky character. How hard could that be?

I… what?

Check code, recompile, recheck code, recompile, rejig code, recompile.

Well at least that grinning sprite has gone. He really wasn’t helping.

Go back and take the tutorial code verbatim.

o_O

OK, what the heck is going on here? Basically I spent about 2 hours doing everything I could possibly think of from adding delays and re-draws in the code to installing different emulators and running on that (and it worked in a worse emulator than BGB!). I was stumped. So I went to bed.

Woke up with a couple of ideas (they didn’t work) and so, for the first of what I expect will be many occasions, I turned to the community and got put on the right track. And learned some stuff! Winner! For all the details, read the community thread.

(Aside: If you spotted that the weird area correlated to the size and position of the “Nintendo” text that appears when you boot the Game Boy, you get 10 points.)

For what it’s worth, there was actually little straightforward instruction on what I learned out there on the web, so I took the time to be a good citizen and post my learnings more concisely over in the thread. My goal right now is not to write tutorials, but perhaps these snippets will help future newbies get up to speed that little bit faster during those crucial early days of a new hobby.

Well said, Jake.

So today I not only got backgrounds working, I also made it scroll in glorious 60fps! Unlike this nightmarish, janky GIF representation:

I can make Game Boys do what I cannot make GIFs capture properly

Time Spent: About 2 hours getting confused and irritated, then an additional 1 hour learning useful things and implementing something to give you a headache.

Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *