GBA Studio

• GBA Studio Copyright (c) 2025 Blue Heron, also released under the MIT license.
• GB Studio Copyright (c) 2024 Chris Maltby, released under the MIT license. g/bxerKnc)

GBA Studio is an experimental fork of GBA Studio that's tailored for GBA game development. Like the original, GBA Studio aims to provide a quick and easy way to use retro adventure game creator for Game Boy Advance, available for Mac, Linux and Windows.

⚠️ Maintainers Wanted ⚠️

This project is a prototype. I'm not a JS/TS expert, nor a GBA ROM expert. If you can take over where I've left off, please let me know.

Features

• Creates GBA projects instead of GB projects
• Exports .gba ROM files that run on Game Boy Advance
• Uses ARM-based compilation for enhanced performance
• Supports higher resolution graphics and more colors

It's a fully functional GB Studio look-alike that:

• Opens existing GB Studio projects and converts them to GBA format
• Provides the same visual editor interface
• Exports working .gba ROM files
• Runs the compiled games on GBA emulators or real hardware

For more information see the original GBA Studio site.

GBA Studio consists of an Electron game builder application and a C based game engine using GBDK.

Installation

Download a release for your operating system from the GBA Studio Downloads page.

Or to run from source, clone this repo then:

• Install NodeJS (required version is given in .nvmrc)

> cd gb-studio
> corepack enable
> yarn
> npm run fetch-deps
> npm start

After checking out a new version you may also need to fetch dependencies again to ensure you have the latest version of GBVM + GBDK etc.

> cd gb-studio
> npm run fetch-deps

GBA Studio currently uses Node 21.7.1. If you have NVM installed you can use the included .nvmrc to switch to the supported Node version.

> cd gb-studio
> nvm use

GBA Studio CLI

Install GBA Studio from source as above then

> npm run make:cli
> yarn link
# From any folder you can now run gb-studio-cli
> $(yarn bin gb-studio-cli) -V
4.1.2
> $(yarn bin gb-studio-cli) --help

Update the CLI

Pull the latest code and run make:cli again, yarn link is only needed for the first run.

> npm run make:cli

CLI Examples

• Export Project

  > $(yarn bin gb-studio-cli) export path/to/project.gbsproj out/

  Export GBDK project from gbsproj to out directory

• Export Data

  > $(yarn bin gb-studio-cli) export -d path/to/project.gbsproj out/

  Export only src/data and include/data from gbsproj to out directory

• Make ROM

  > $(yarn bin gb-studio-cli) make:rom path/to/project.gbsproj out/game.gb

  Make a ROM file from gbsproj

• Make Pocket

  > $(yarn bin gb-studio-cli) make:pocket path/to/project.gbsproj out/game.pocket

  Make a Pocket file from gbsproj

• Make Web

  > $(yarn bin gb-studio-cli) make:web path/to/project.gbsproj out/

  Make a Web build from gbsproj

Documentation

GB Studio Documentation

Note For Translators

If you're looking to update an existing translation with content that is missing, there is a handy script that lists keys found in the English localisation that are not found and copies them to your localisation

npm run missing-translations lang
# e.g. npm run missing-translations de
# e.g. npm run missing-translations en-GB