programming a gba game on an iphone

1 min read Original article ↗

2026-06-08

it recently occurred to me that it would be possible to make a gba game entirely on my phone - once it did, i couldn't get the idea out of my head until i'd tried it

so, i made a short bitsylike game called TO THE TOWER - you can download it from itch.io if you'd like to play!

here are all the apps and tools i used to make the game on my phone:

  • toolchain: gba bootstrap + gcc-arm-none-eabi
  • shell: iSH - this is an alpine linux shell for iOS, which is what i used to compile the game (you can install the necessary arm gcc toolchain directly from the package manager within the app!)
  • text editor: textastic - a very nice text editor for iOS
  • emulator: delta - i used this emulator to test the game on my phone