Why Zig Is Ideal for GBA Game Development and Retro Embedded Systems

An experience developing a Game Boy Advance (GBA) game in Zig was published on a personal blog in December 2024. The project involved porting the puzzle game “2048” to the GBA, detailing the reasons for choosing the language and the implementation advantages.

Zig is a relatively new programming language that debuted in 2015, still in beta as of 2024. Considering the GBA was released in 2001, there is a 15-year gap. Despite this, the combination proved effective due to the characteristics of the language design.

Characteristics of the GBA Platform

The GBA features a 32-bit ARM CPU with a modern architecture boasting numerous registers, while its rendering method follows the tile-based approach from the NES era. It is one of the last tile-based systems from Nintendo, packed with advanced features such as affine transformations, transparency, and sprite effects.

This combination of “old rendering methods and a new CPU” creates a unique development environment. The Nintendo DS shares similar traits, but its dual-screen setup was deemed to increase programming difficulty, so the GBA was chosen for this project.

The game selected for development is the puzzle game “2048.” The developer, familiar with games like Picross and Minesweeper that involve “filling grids with numbers and rules,” implemented it for the GBA.

Toolchain Issues and Zig’s Solution

The biggest barrier in retro game development is setting up the toolchain. For GBA and DS development, devKitPro is widely used. It packages the GCC toolchain, libraries, and development tools. The installation method borrows from ArchLinux’s package manager, setting up a repository for devKitPro to fetch packages.

The developer expressed strong discomfort with this approach. Having to install an additional package manager hardly makes for a comfortable development environment. When previously prototyping a 3D scene for the DS, they experienced the same inconvenience and attempted to port the linker script to a repository to make it work with a standard ARM GCC toolchain.

The same issue persisted when starting the GBA demo project. They had to copy devKitPro’s linker script and force a configuration with the Meson build system, resorting to ad-hoc workarounds.

Zig fundamentally solves this problem. Cross-compilation is built into the language as a standard feature, eliminating the need for additional package managers or dedicated toolchains. Simply specifying the target architecture generates the required binaries.

Advantages of Language Design Under Memory

Constraints

The GBA has extremely limited memory. Zig’s compile-time code execution and explicit memory management mechanisms work naturally under such constraints. The lack of a runtime is also crucial for making efficient use of limited resources.

Compared to C++, Zig reduces friction around the toolchain and greatly simplifies project setup. Especially in retro embedded development, reproducibility of the build environment is key for long-term maintenance. Zig’s self-contained build system meets this requirement.

As the developer points out, this blog post does not argue for Zig’s general superiority. It focuses solely on “why Zig is effective in specific embedded environments like the GBA.” Evaluation of Zig for other development settings and use cases is left to other sources.

Implementation and Future Outlook

The completed GBA version of “2048” runs on an emulator and is ready for testing. The source code is also publicly available, serving as a reference for anyone attempting GBA development in Zig.

This case demonstrates that the simplicity of Zig’s toolchain management offers a significant advantage in specific embedded environments. Retro game development in particular tends to rely heavily on community-driven tools, where deviations from standard toolchains easily become obstacles. Zig’s approach could become a practical option in such areas.

Editorial Opinion

In the short term, this GBA development case with Zig has the potential to spark new discussions within the retro game development community. In particular, its build method independent of devKitPro is noteworthy for lowering the barrier to environment setup. The “proliferation of package managers” problem the developer faced is a common challenge in embedded development, and Zig’s solution may have spillover effects for other languages.

In the long term, whether Zig will become a standard language for retro game development remains uncertain. However, its ease of cross-compilation and lack of runtime could grow in importance. Even in modern embedded systems development, minimizing dependencies tends to be valued from a sustainability perspective. This case shows how language design philosophy translates into actual productivity in the context of development for older hardware.

Although the theme of this article differs from AI agents or image generation, from the standpoint of tool selection criteria, it can be viewed within the same framework as discussions in LangGraph vs AutoGen vs CrewAI: AI Agent Comparison 2026 and HIDream-O1-Image-1.5 Ranks World Second in Image Generation. Also, as SwitchBot’s Parent Company Acquires Nanoleaf for Approximately 4 Billion Yen shows the expansion of hardware development ecosystems, the impact of language choice freedom on development efficiency will become an increasingly notable topic.

References

• Why I Wrote a Game Boy Advance Game in Zig (2024) - jonot.me — Published 2024-12-03 (Trending on Lobsters 2026-06-12)