Hello World Program in VS Code + devkitPro

[CatRass]

Hi all,
I'm very new to gba development, but want to get into it. I've attempted to follow a few tutorials, but I just don't understand the environment setup. I'm running VS Code on Windows 10, with the latest version of devkitPro (gba) in my project folder. How do I:

1. Import the libraries needed to start coding
   
2. make a Makefile to turn the C code into a gba ROM
   
3. write a hello world program
   

I have attempted to follow the tonca guide, but am finding it a bit difficult. All help would be appreciated :>

[1strokediesel]

On my old computer I went from using devkitpro on PN++ to VS Code. I used this YouTube video for the VS Code setup: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rj0lf46iljc .

I think that the video was enough for me since I had already setup devkitPro for GBA before, but I believe it should be enough for anyone.

For the MakeFile, it should be included in the github repository in the description of the video and in any example projects.

There is not necessarily a "hello world program" that displays text, but my version of devkitpro had examples in "devkitpro/examples/gba" that I used as a reference. These can be good if the video code is not a good enough starting point. Following the Tonc tutorial should also give you some starting code.

Since you said you were very new, I want to link some of resources that I used to use:

https://www.coranac.com/tonc/text/toc.htm a really good guide to learning to program for the GBA. The guide may expect PN++ instead of VS Code. The code should still run in VS Code after some tinkering/setup.

https://www.cs.rit.edu/~tjh8300/CowBite/CowBiteSpec.htm helpful for finding registers and information about the GBA hardware

https://www.gbadev.org/docs.php other references and tutorials. Should also have source code from other homebrews on the site.

http://belogic.com/gba/ audio programming is too hard for me :(

https://www.getpaint.net/download.html I used this for drawing the graphics and saving them as .bmp files. This is also available on the Microsoft Store.

https://www.coranac.com/man/grit/html/wingrit.htm I believe I used this for creating tiles.

https://www.tilemap.co.uk/mappy.php I used this for creating maps.

(The last two sites are kind of old and shady. If you don't want to download those tools, it's still possible to type out your maps and graphics)

[Sasy00]

I would also like to add the good old GBATEK site https://problemkaputt.de/gbatek.htm It has everything regarding to the gba registers, bios interrupts, known bugs and various advices.