I did a little bit of GBA homebrew development back in its heyday. It is a really fun little bit of hardware to hack on.
It's powerful enough that you can write your whole game in C++, but not so powerful that you should rely on the system allocator for anything.
It's in a lovely sweet spot for a particular dialect of zero-overhead C++ that's really fun to write.
As a simple example, I had a little class library of data types that were crafted to exactly map to the hardware registers of the GBA. The whole thing inlined away to nothing.
I've gotten into GBA homebrew again recently. The community is small but getting a bit bigger. gbadev on Discord is a fun place to hang out.
The tooling doesn't seem to have changed all that much from back in the day, which isn't a bad thing: the best way to get music on the GBA is still to compose something in an old-fashioned tracker and using Maxmod to import it. Sprite conversion tools haven't changed that much.
Programming it is just so lovely bare-metal: poking/prodding registers, writing backgrounds and sprites into memory regions.. Really fun stuff.
It's powerful enough that you can write your whole game in C++, but not so powerful that you should rely on the system allocator for anything.
It's in a lovely sweet spot for a particular dialect of zero-overhead C++ that's really fun to write.
As a simple example, I had a little class library of data types that were crafted to exactly map to the hardware registers of the GBA. The whole thing inlined away to nothing.