8086tiny_gba

8086tiny, but it runs on the GBA. It can run inside a Pokémon Emerald save file too.

This was a silly toy project I made for a silly YouTube video, and it's not something I intend to actively maintain.

Why?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Want to try it out?

Precompiled GBA ROMs, as well as the Pokémon Emerald save file, are available under bin/.

Building from source

You'll need the following:

• GNU ARM binutils installed, more exactly arm-none-eabi-gcc, arm-none-eabi-as and arm-none-eabi-objcopy (on Ubuntu, you can get them with apt install gcc-arm-none-eabi, which will install all necessary packages in one go).
• Python 3 installed and available in PATH as python3 (on Ubuntu, you can just apt install python3).
• GNU build tools, most notably make (on Ubuntu, apt install build-essential).

Go to the source directory:

cd src

Compile the standalone ROM version:

make gba

Or the Pokémon Emerald save file version (aka JoyBus version):

make sav

Included boot images

The emulated PC will boot from contents of fd.img, and will read BIOS code from bios. The included files are the same ones included with 8086tiny.

The disk drive emulator

The standalone ROM version includes the image files within the resulting ROM - however, JoyBus versions will require connecting to an emulated external disk drive over the GBA link port.

A software emulator is included, which will work for mGBA and VBA-M. Simply run python3 joybus.py to start it.