RGBDS

RGBDS (Rednex Game Boy Development System) is a free assembler/linker package for the Game Boy and Game Boy Color. It consists of:

• rgbasm (assembler)
• rgblink (linker)
• rgbfix (checksum/header fixer)
• rgbgfx (PNG‐to‐Game Boy graphics converter)

This is a fork of the original RGBDS which aims to make the programs more like other UNIX tools.

Building RGBDS

RGBDS requires yacc, flex, libpng and pkg-config to be installed.

On macOS, install the latter two with Homebrew:

brew install libpng pkg-config

On other Unixes, use the built-in package manager. For example, on Debian or Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install byacc flex pkg-config libpng-dev

You can test if libpng and pkg-config are installed by running pkg-config --cflags libpng: if the output is a path, then you're good, and if it outputs an error then you need to install them via a package manager.

To build the programs on a UNIX or UNIX-like system, just run in your terminal:

make

Then to install the compiled programs and manual pages, run (with appropriate privileges):

make install

After installation, you can read the manuals with the man(1) command. E.g.,

man 1 rgbasm

Note: the variables described below can affect installation behavior when given on the make command line. For example, to install rgbds in your home directory instead of systemwide, run the following:

mkdir -p $HOME/{bin,man/man1,man/man7}
make install PREFIX=$HOME

PREFIX: Location where RGBDS will be installed. Defaults to /usr/local.

BINPREFIX: Location where the RGBDS programs will be installed. Defaults to ${PREFIX}/bin.

MANPREFIX: Location where the RGBDS man pages will be installed. Defaults to ${PREFIX}/man.

Q: Whether to quiet the build or not. To make the build more verbose, clear this variable. Defaults to @.

STRIP: Whether to strip the installed binaries of debug symbols or not. Defaults to -s.

BINMODE: Permissions of the installed binaries. Defaults to 555.

MANMODE: Permissions of the installed manpages. Defaults to 444.

Installing RGBDS (macOS)

If you would prefer not to build RGBDS yourself, you may also install it using Homebrew. To install the latest release, use:

brew install rgbds

To install RGBDS with all of the current changes in development (as seen on GitHub), use:

brew install rgbds --HEAD

Installing RGBDS (Windows)

Windows builds are available here: https://github.com/rednex/rgbds/releases

Copy the .exe files to C:\Windows\ or similar.