SM8300: A Game Boy Color Demo
* Remember to click the embedded emulator to get sound! We reccomend downloading the .GBC file! *
SM8300 is our loving tribute to the best handheld ever made, the Nintendo Game Boy Color! A (tech) demo showing off what the system is truly capable of when put through the right coders/artists!
Made in 10 days for Yogi's GB Showdown 2025: Cutscene Edition!
This is also the first release by WitchBiz, a name I hope to use for future similar projects :3.
How To Watch
Simply download the ROM file and play it using your favorite Game Boy emulator, Emulation console or official hardware! Due to the technical tricks in the demo some systems/emulators may have issues, specially older emulators (VBA Specially, Stop using VBA). We reccomend using Sameboy, Emulicious, BGB or Mesen2. This page also has a web build, but this has noticeable audio delay.
Tested Systems/Emulators
- Game Boy Color (CGB-C)
- Game Boy Advance (AGS-101)
- Analogue Pocket
- ModRetro Chromatic
- FP-GBC (Tested on non-stable 1.14)
- Sameboy
- Emulicious
- BGB
- Mesen2
- mGBA (Audio is completely broken)
Credits
Code
Graphics
Lucien.D20
Music
Coffee 'Valen' Bat
Lucien.D20
Crappy Graphics and 3D Animation
Coffee 'Valen' Bat
Made Using
With Code/Assets by:
Special ❤️Thanks
ISSOtm
PinoBatch
Evie
2BitCrook
Tildearrow
Damien G.
SuperDisk
Diskkun
Nitro2k01
Developer0
Calindro
0xbbbbbr
Forple
Rangi42
Beatscribe
Yogi
And everyone at the GBDev community ❤️
Download
Click download now to get access to the following files:
Comments
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60 awesome seconds! :)
Wow! Excellent entry!
This is great! I just wish it was longer
Very impressive. Loving that 3D wireframe!
"notice how there's more than ten characters per line btw"
-MIND-SUCESSFULLY-BLOWN-
Haha, glad to see someone finally notice!
How'd you do it?
In short, First I render the text layer in software, which is not very expensive CPU wise since scrolling the text up just means moving everything one byte backwards.
Afterwards I overlay it into the background layer in RAM and copy the blended buffer into VRAM using some special GBC DMA features, this second part IS very CPU expensive, since it means ORing 4KiB of data.
The background layer is just a normal piece of GBC artwork with the exception that color 3 of every tile is reserved for the text color.
I got inspired to code this by a GG tech demo!
https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=56575
It's so interesting that GBC games can do that. I wonder why more devs didn't take advantage of that. Seems like you could do a lot of really cool stuff. Maybe even parallax backgrounds with multiple layers?
That would make a cool demo!
This is so super awesome. Graphics, music and animations - 5 stars!This was a magical experience. Very inspired by the coding, and wonder how you do all that!
Glad you found it magical! Hopefully at some point I can make a post mortem explaining each section :3
Super impressive!
Amazing work! Really lived up to the hype! 😎
Very very good! Thank you for making this.
This is so good
Impressive!
beautiful
Absolutely incredible! I have no idea how you managed to squeeze this much out of the Game Boy Color! Super impressive!