Gameboy Development Forum

I don't have any popularity figures, only my own anecdotal experience, but I think RGBDS is more popular.

As I was learning to program GB, more material seemed to be written for RGBDS. That may be influenced by the fact that—as far as I can tell—RGBDS is older, and much of the material you learn from even today is similarly old (I've read much material from the late 90s/early 2000s). That was a big motivator in my decision to use RGBDS over WLA-DX. This relatively recent tutorial series uses RGBDS, as does this one (though interestingly enough that blog has another version of the same tutorial for yet another assembler: Wiz). Also, there's a popular disassembly out there of cough a major Game Boy RPG that I shall neither name nor link to here out of an abundance of caution to try to remain above water, and it's meant to be recompiled with RGBDS.

Last edited by DonaldHays (2016-08-11 16:09:06)

Well there's this documentation for RGBDS syntax, but I don't know of anything that documents the exact differences between RGBDS and WLA-DX. For naming standards, I haven't seen anything suggesting any sort of standard that the community has arrived on, so if I was writing a disassembler I would probably just try to take inspiration from as much precedent as possible. There's a lot of old code samples and libraries available, including a common hardware define file.

There's also gbasm. Not sure if anyone uses it.

Also, there are more up-to-date docs for RGBDS here in the Bentley RGBDS github repo.