Butano examples

One of the best ways to learn is by example! Once you’ve got Butano Contained opened in VS Code in a Dev Container, start exploring. Check out the examples directory to start. There are comprehensive examples showing off every major feature of Butano. To explore an example:

1. cd to the desired example directory
2. Run make
3. Open the ROM in mGBA
4. Look at the source code. See what you can understand and what you don’t. Try modifying things and see what happens. Don’t worry abnout breaking anything!
5. Go to another example! Don’t forget that cd is relative, you’ll need to run cd .. each time you need to get back to a parent directory. pwd and ls are your friends if you ever get lost

Want to look at something bigger? Butano also has full games under the games directory. Make sure to check those out too!

gbadev chat

Another great way to learn is through community. I strongly recommend joining the chat channel for the gbadev community. You can use either IRC or Discord, the conversations get mirrored. I encourage you in particular to check out the #showcase and #butano channels

showcase: People showing off cool things they’ve made for the GBA! butano: A great place to get help using Butano.

Of course, as with any community take a moment to learn their rules and be polite. In particular, this community is one of the most anti-AI software development communities I’ve seen online. If you bring them obvious AI slop and tell them to debug it, they will not be pleased with you! But in general this is a very welcoming and beginner friendly community.