Tag: GBStudio

Othello Trigger

Presented largely as a curiosity, but an entertaining one. An itch.io user named The Great Foohachi went through the trouble of converting background and character graphics from beloved SNES Squaresoft JRPG Chrono Trigger to Gameboy format, and from there put them to work as window dressing for a fairly rudimentary single-player Othello clone, a.k.a. Reversi, using GB Studio, which is rapidly becoming a go-to tool for this kind of monkeyshine. I would expect that 90% of the 256K ROM space goes into the art, which is really only there to give it some prologue cutscenes.

How does it play? Once you get to the game portion, fairly slowly, but it works. I played a round on Normal difficulty and won pretty easily. The thing to remember is, try to look ahead a move or two, don’t set up your opponent for huge moves, and if possible don’t let your opponent get a corner spot, while trying all you can to get them yourself.

Here’s a few screenshots. P.S. If you try this, you’ll want to turn the sound off.

This bit of dialogue should give you some idea of how seriously this is taken.
It’s a nice conversion of the SNES game’s graphics at least.

You can’t play as Robo because he’s the opponent, natch.

Othello Trigger (by The Great Foohatchi, Gameboy ROM on itch.io, $0)

GB Studio & BB Studio

GB Studio, by Chris Maltby, is fairly well-known now, isn’t it? It’s a free and open source solution to fairly easily making Gameboy roms on your own, that are properly termed not romhacks but homebrew. It has its own website and it’s available on itch.io. It was what Grimace’s Birthday, which we linked to last year, was made with.

GB Studio, from its platformer template

Now there’s a heavily-modified version of GB Studio, called BB Studio, that produces NES roms in a similar manner! It’s made by Michel Iwaniec, and can be gotten from Github here. It’s recommended that you be familiar with GB Studio first, and to read the list of caveats on the page. Particularly, the NES supports fewer sprites per scanline than the Gameboy hardware does, and runs at a slower clock speed. BB Studio is also “early alpha software,” meaning, it might or might not work well for you at the moment.

While we’re on the topic I should also mention NES Maker, which isn’t free, but it also isn’t “early alpha software,” and at $36 isn’t expensive either, and is custom-built for generating runnable NES games.