RGBDS (Rednex Game Boy Development System) is a free assembler/linker package for the Game Boy and Game Boy Color.

It consists of four tools:

• RGBASM: assembler
• RGBLINK: linker
• RGBFIX: ROM checksum/header fixer
• RGBGFX: PNG-to-Game Boy graphics converter

The full documentation is available online, including the development history and version history, generated from the man pages in this repository.

The documentation website's own source code is available in the rgbds-www repository.

If you have questions about the RGBDS code or its organization, you can contact the maintainers on the GBDev Discord server or other community channels, or via email at rgbds at gbdev dot io.

If you want to help maintain RGBDS, please read the contribution guide.

The platform-specific installation instructions are available online. To build from source using make or cmake, briefly:

make
sudo make install

cmake -S . -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cmake --build build
cmake --install build

Both build systems support a prefix (e.g. to install into a specific directory) and a suffix (e.g. to append the version number or commit ID):

make
sudo make install PREFIX=install_dir/ SUFFIX=-$(git rev-parse --short HEAD)

cmake -S . -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DSUFFIX=-$(git rev-parse --short HEAD)
cmake --build build
cmake --install build --prefix install_dir

On Windows, any SUFFIX should include the .exe extension.