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Game / Handheld
2048 for Game Boy Color
Running on hardware
A real Game Boy Color cartridge ROM, written in C and played on a ModRetro Chromatic over an EverDrive. Thirty-two kilobytes, CGB only, MBC5 with battery-backed save. The best score, your settings, and the game in progress all survive a power cycle, so the handheld can be switched off mid-board and picked back up.
Game Boy ColorCGBDK-2020HomebrewRetro Hardware
Current Shape
- Tile art is generated rather than drawn: a Python step renders every glyph and tile face, then packs them into a deduplicated bank of 144 of the 256 available tiles.
- Colour comes from the CGB palette instead of the art, so all values share one geometry and differ only by palette, and the ramp costs almost nothing.
- Sliding animation composed in a shadow buffer with four speed settings, plus a merge flash and a staged tile spawn so a move reads as three beats rather than one redraw.
- Sound on two pulse channels with merge pitch rising by value, so a cascade is voiced by its biggest tile.
- Screenshots are captured by replaying a scripted joypad file through binjgb, which makes every frame of the game reproducible pixel for pixel.
Build Log
Resume across a power cycle
Board, score and win state are written to cartridge RAM after every move, and the title screen offers Continue when there is something to return to. The game state lives in its own block with its own checksum so adding it could not invalidate the existing best-score save.