Nerd Herder

Mon 10 October 2011

Nerd Herder is an arcade style game for the Gameboy Advance.

splash screen

Your goal as head TA is to guide your students to their academic destinies. You do this by chasing the best and brightest students to the dorm to study, while driving the less capable to the M-Train¹. At your disposal are your passion for quality education and two power ups. A readme is included with the ROM with a more complete description of gameplay.

action shot

The game is written in C. The nifty technical features include:

  • Direct Memory Access (DMA) to load the tiles/tile map, sprites, color palette, and to keep the sound buffer full
  • Animated sprites with transparency
  • Scrolling background
  • Music (pcm encoded, not beeps and boops)
  • Inline assembly to access BIOS functionality

Download ROM and Readme: NerdHerder

Browse Source: GitHub repo

¹At Georgia Tech, to “board the M-Train” is to transfer from a science or engineering major to management. Refer to Urban Dictionary or this informational music video.