GB Studio

Copyright (c) 2019-2026 Chris Maltby, released under the MIT license.

Patreon: gbstudiodev
Twitter: @maltby
Reddit: /r/gbstudio
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GB Studio is a quick and easy to use retro game creator for Game Boy available for Mac, Linux and Windows. For more information see the GB Studio site

GB Studio consists of an Electron game builder application and GBVM, a C-based game engine using GBDK.

Installation

Download a release for your operating system from the GB Studio Downloads page.

Or to run from source, clone this repo then:

• Install NodeJS (required version is given in .nvmrc)

> cd gb-studio
> corepack enable
> yarn
> npm run fetch-deps
> npm start

After checking out a new version you may also need to fetch dependencies again to ensure you have the latest version of GBVM + GBDK etc.

> cd gb-studio
> npm run fetch-deps

GB Studio currently uses Node 24 LTS. If you have NVM installed you can use the included .nvmrc to switch to the supported Node version.

> cd gb-studio
> nvm use

GB Studio CLI

Install GB Studio from source as above then

> npm run make:cli
> yarn link
# From any folder you can now run gb-studio-cli
> $(yarn bin gb-studio-cli) -V
> $(yarn bin gb-studio-cli) --help

Update the CLI

Pull the latest code and run make:cli again, yarn link is only needed for the first run.

> npm run make:cli

CLI Examples

• Export Project

  > $(yarn bin gb-studio-cli) export path/to/project.gbsproj out/
  

  Export GBDK project from gbsproj to out directory

• Export Data

  > $(yarn bin gb-studio-cli) export -d path/to/project.gbsproj out/
  

  Export only src/data and include/data from gbsproj to out directory

• Make ROM

  > $(yarn bin gb-studio-cli) make:rom path/to/project.gbsproj out/game.gb
  

  Make a ROM file from gbsproj

• Make Pocket

  > $(yarn bin gb-studio-cli) make:pocket path/to/project.gbsproj out/game.pocket
  

  Make a Pocket file from gbsproj

• Make Web

  > $(yarn bin gb-studio-cli) make:web path/to/project.gbsproj out/
  

  Make a Web build from gbsproj

• Make ROM with Usage Report

  > $(yarn bin gb-studio-cli) make:rom path/to/project.gbsproj out/game.gb --usage
  

  Make a ROM file from gbsproj and print a ROM usage report to stdout

GBS Music

A standalone web application of the music editor is available at https://music.gbstudio.dev/

To run this application locally

> npm run start:music-web

or to generate the assets for self hosting

> npm run build:music-web

which will output build files to out/music-web.

Documentation

GB Studio Documentation

Note For Translators

If you'd like to help contribute new language localisations to GB Studio you can do so by submitting pull requests adding or updating the JSON files found here https://github.com/chrismaltby/gb-studio/tree/develop/src/lang

If you're looking to update an existing translation with content that is missing, there is a handy script that lists keys found in the English localisation that are not found and copies them to your localisation

npm run missing-translations lang
# e.g. npm run missing-translations de
# e.g. npm run missing-translations en-GB