Game Boy Forum

If NesDev is the best place for NES emulation/development etc. then where is the best place for the Game Boy (original/colour)?

The GBDev board? Or did you mean other sites?

Other sites .

I've made a forum for the purpose, which is relatively low activity, but at least there's actually SOME activity.

http://gbdev.gg8.se/forums/

Also, IRC users may want to drop by #gbdev on EFNet.

So the NES gets this massive place full of dedicated, hardcore people and the Game Boy gets that tiny little forum...

No offense.

GB used to have active scene in late 90s and early 2000s. It grown pretty large in GBA days, but now it seems all declined.

Yeah. I haven't exactly promoted it, though. But yes, that is the state of affairs. Today's GB scene has everything else. People making music in LSDj. Cosmetic hardware modders. The occasional developer who'd rather make yet another emulator than program software for the actual console. Everything but hardcore people. It's a shame, really. I feel kind of guilty, as I could perhaps have made a bigger change if I had kept advocating the GB scene.

I can come up with (at least) two explanations why the GB homebrew scene sucks compared to NES.
1) The hardcore guys see it as a toy console compared to NES.
2) The NES CPU is basically a 6502, so there's a lot of skill overlap with the C64 scene. The GB has a CPU that's basically a crippled Z80/8080, which makes it less interesting.

That and 6502 skill overlap with people who learned Apple II assembly in middle school back when schools still had Apple II computers. And skill overlap with Atari computers and Atari consoles. And the fact that the PowerPak gave NESdev a boost when it came out. The Game Boy Advance has the SuperCard and M3, but only for GBA mode, not GB/GBC mode.

What boards/sites have C64 dev? (like this one).

I think the SuperCard does include a GameBoy emulator built-in though (the emulator isn't perfect; for one thing, HiColor doesn't seem to work).

I think the emulator built into some of these flash cards is a derivative of an old version of Goomba. Newer versions of Goomba support Game Boy Color, but I'd bet they still can't run demos that detect emulators.

Gambatte can run that demo.

Unlike Goomba, Gambatte can't run on a GBA, however.

How is that any better than using a more accurate emulator on the PC for development?

Well, it is better if you want to play the game when you are not at your computer if you don't have a GameBoy (or you don't have a cartridge that you can load your own program in). Other than that, it is clearly not better! Using real GameBoy and/or accurate emulator is clearly much better. (Also, if you update the SuperCard, you will have a color GameBoy emulator.)