I am interested in making a new game for an antique system (leaning towards the gameboy). Would it be possible to export a unity game for this purpose? I know unity doesn’t support it, and that a lot of optomizing is neccessary, but do you guys know if its possible?
Even at its most pared down, Unity would completely annihilate a gameboy if it were possible to export to it. If you’re looking at that sort of thing you’re generally going to be looking at developing at a very low level.
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No, it’s actually impossible with Unity’s architecture. A single C# program probably wouldn’t get small enough or efficient enough either.
You need asm for that bad (game) boy.
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No way, most likely.
You coudl use unity as some sort of level editor, though - export data from it and feed it to your gameboy program (you’ll have to write all those tools by yourself - including import/export/conversion tools and the gameboy program).
Also, see gameboy system specs:
8bit CPU running at 4 Mhz, equivalent to 8080.
8kb internal ram.
8kb video ram.
Up to 8 Mb rom memory.
This kind of hardware calls for assembler or C compiler (C without ++).
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Thanks for the specs and the quick feedback. I am familiar with programming on a low level (I programmed an RPG on my graphing-calculator) Any good software you can recommend for this type of programming? I really don’t have any clue where to start, so I came here, since I typically use unity to develop.
Here’s the first search hit on “gameboy C compiler”
http://gbdk.sourceforge.net/
Here’s the third one:
http://www.loirak.com/gameboy/gbprog.php
If i were trying to do something like that I would start looking for “gameboy C compiler” “gameboy assembler” “making custom rom gameboy” and the like on google, would try to make those tools work and then would see about getting something simple to run on some gameboy emulator.
Should be relatively straightforward…
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The tools used for GB dev are super out of date and don’t work well. The C compiler makes mistakes and it’s a huge pain… like compile 5 times with slightly different whitespace to get the actual output.
But yeah, if you think Unity will run on a GB then probably you can’t make anything run on a GB.
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I am aware now that unity wouldn’t work, and I am aware that the GB has just about as much support as a TI-85 (i.e. non at all). I still plan to proceed with it, even if it might take me a while. (I already made a ‘hello world’ program that runs fine on an emulator that models the system limits of a GB)
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If i recall correctly I’ve seen someone overclock gameboys quite a bit by doing nothing but changing the clock signal; you could double your clock speed if you need some more raw performance, but be warned that everything will be twice as fast
given the actual size of the gameboy controls + screen I’d say you could come out with a mobile game, half - 2/3 of the screen could mimic the gameboy controls and and for the game itself use the same resolution and color(?) palette as the original. but you won’t like this idea … I have a feeling 
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