RGBDS(7)

📦
version 1.0.4 · 4 versions
, in arch rolling, nixpkgs unstable

🎀 RGBDS 🎀

Okay so bestie, welcome to rgbds — the Rednex Game Boy Development System — straight outta the Miscellaneous Information Manual, section 7. This is the umbrella page for the whole little family of tools, and yeah, it's short, but it's iconic. Let's get into it 💅

✨ NAME ✨

rgbds — Rednex Game Boy Development System

Like, that's the whole name section. Short king. We love that for us 🫶

🌸 EXAMPLES 🌸

So you wanna turn one lil assembly source file into a working ROM image? Bet. Here's the classic three-step serve:

$ rgbasm -o game.o game.asm
$ rgblink -o game.gb game.o
$ rgbfix -v -p 0 game.gb

Or — and this is the main character move — you can do it all in a single command line, no intermediate object file needed, no cap:

$ (rgbasm -o - - | rgblink -o - - | rgbfix -v -p 0) < game.asm > game.gb

Look at those pipes. Look at that redirect. We're literally funneling game.asm in and popping game.gb out the other end. ate and left no crumbs ✨

🦋 SEE ALSO 🦋

Your besties in the toolchain, go say hi:

👑 HISTORY 👑

Okay this is the part where I get emotional, because the lore goes back. Sit down, grab a strawberry 🍓, we're doing a timeline:

  • 1996-10-01: Carsten Sørensen (a.k.a. SurfSmurf) releases xAsm, xLink, and RGBFix, a Game Boy SM83 (GBZ80) assembler/linker system for DOS/Win32.
  • 1997-07-03: Sørensen releases ASMotor, packaging the three programs together and moving towards making them a general-purpose target-independent system.
  • 1999-08-01: Justin Lloyd (a.k.a. Otaku no Zoku) adapts ASMotor to re-focus on SM83 assembly/machine code, and releases this version as RGBDS.
  • 2009-06-11: Vegard Nossum adapts the code to be more UNIX-like and releases this version as rgbds-linux.
  • 2010-01-12: Anthony J. Bentley forks Nossum's repository. The fork becomes the reference implementation of RGBDS.
  • 2010-09-25: Sørensen continues development of ASMotor: https://github.com/asmotor/asmotor to this day.
  • 2015-01-18: stag019 begins implementing RGBGFX, a PNG-to-Game Boy graphics converter, for eventual integration into RGBDS.
  • 2016-09-05: RGBGFX is integrated into Bentley's repository.
  • 2017-02-23: Bentley's repository is moved to the rednex: https://github.com/rednex/rgbds organization.
  • 2018-01-26: The codebase is relicensed under the MIT license.
  • 2020-09-15: The repository is moved to the gbdev: https://github.com/gbdev/rgbds organization.
  • 2022-05-17: The rgbds.gbdev.io: https://rgbds.gbdev.io website for RGBDS documentation and downloads is published.
  • 2025-10-31: RGBDS reaches version 1.0.0 and starts adhering to semantic versioning: https://semver.org/ ("semver").
💀 Not the decades of handoffs. Multiple whole generations of maintainers kept this thing alive and I think that's beautiful, fr fr.

And that's the page, bestie — this one's from Debian, dated September 22, 2026, and it lives at RGBDS(7) in the manual. Go build something cute 🧚‍♀️💖

📦 where this page comes from