The Game Boy Advance (GBA) is a beloved handheld console with a unique hardware architecture that demands careful management of interrupts for tasks like rendering, timing, and input handling. In Rust, implementing interrupt handlers can be tricky due to the language’s emphasis on safety, lifetimes, and ownership. Traditional approaches often rely on global mutable state to share data with handlers — but this makes the code harder to reason about and avoiding multiple mutable references becomes a mess.

The Game Boy Advance has a very unusual memory layout compared to modern systems. How can you utilize Rust to use each memory area with high performance and safe code?

During 2009-2012, I went to high-school. During that time, I learned how to program and made two games: Elves of Lorién and Morph Rock. Elves of Lorién was developed during my first and second year using my spare time, and Morph Rock was part of a final project during my last year. Both games were successfully released on Windows Phone 7.

In my first post, I mentioned the software used to host this site. Now, let’s talk about the hardware, or, the lack of it!

Some time ago, my “Raspberry pi inside the gameboy color” project was completed. More details how I build the device will be posted at a later date. Here is a video showcasing the finished project. Enjoy!