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New Section Idea: "Coming from GBStudio?" #169
Description
Following up on a discussion on Discord with @ISSOtm - there was the idea of a new section in the tutorial for people who have experience with GBStudio and are interested in doing some asm. This would ideally be written with someone with experience in both fields. I'm just going off the GBStudio docs for some ideas on this one https://www.gbstudio.dev/docs/
What's the same in GBStudio ?
- tiles are 8x8
- palettes have four colours and sprite palette colour 0 is transparent
- same screen size
- same maximum number of tiles in vram
- sprite limits per line
- you can use hUGE to write music and reuse GBStudio songs
What's different?/What's a GBStudio feature vs a gameboy feature?
- there's no scripting language or VM in asm
- GBStudio allocates a palette and certain tile vram ranges for things like UI/text, in asm it's your choice
- smallest sprites seem to always be 16x16 in GBStudio? in asm you can have 8x8 or 8x16 sprites and build larger metasprites from those
- GBStudio maps can be > 32x32 tiles and the engine handles scrolling (as long as the map data fits into a 16kb bank), in asm you need to handle scrolling for larger maps yourself
Activity
nummacway commentedon Feb 13, 2026
However, last time I checked (like, 1.5 years ago) GBStudio did not really tell you the hardware restrictions. I even found some GBS restrictions misleading, e.g. object limit per scene (which you could actually exceed with no consequences apparently).
ISSOtm commentedon Feb 16, 2026
Well, yes, that'd be the point of such a page.
avivace commentedon Feb 20, 2026
We have Choosing tools for Game Boy development which tries to explain the various tools, the difference between them (without going into detail) and a general overview of the different approaches depending on the paradigm chosen. Have you seen that? Maybe we can improve that one (and link to it in some initial paragraph of gb-asm-tutorial)
I like the motivation (GBStudio users are a big on-ramp), but I’m worried a “do GBStudio things in ASM” section is premature given where gb-asm-tutorial is today. Right now we still haven’t fully established all the fundamentals.
Without that base, a GBStudio-oriented section risks giving the wrong impression: that there’s a fairly direct mapping where you can “translate” workflows or copy/paste equivalents. In practice, most of what GBStudio gives you is engine/infrastructure (scene system, asset pipelines, VRAM allocation policies, scrolling/tile streaming, entity/collision, UI/text, save/state, etc.) and in ASM those things can't simply be "plug and played". They need to come from an organic system design. We can provide templates / plumbing / examples, but still after we have some solid bases to refer to.
nummacway commentedon Feb 20, 2026
Nice article. It could be improved by:
nummacway commentedon Feb 21, 2026
I made a proposal here.