Android life counters are nice, and most android phone screens are awesome, but let's face it, keeping the screen on for the hours it takes to go through an FNM, or even worse a pre-release tournament, sucks most of the life out of a typical android phone battery.
That's why I decided to write a GameBoy Advance life counter. The GBA SP in particular is very compact, and its battery lasts forever.
Web site: http://nuclear.mutantstargoat.com/sw/mtglife
Copyright (C) 2016 John Tsiombikas nuclear@member.fsf.org
This program is free software. Feel free to use, copy, modify, and/or redistribute it, under the terms of the GNU General Public License v3, or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation. See COPYING for details.
Use the direction-pad up/down buttons to increment or decrement the amount of damage or life-gain, then hit either left or right to apply it to a player's life total.
To directly edit either player's life total, press buttons A or B to enter edit mode, then use the up/down buttons to adjust it. Hit A or B again to apply the change and return to normal mode.
The left/right shoulder buttons can be used to enter undo mode for either player. In this mode, up/down moves back and forth through the life history of the player. A applies the undo, and B cancels.
The start button resets the state of the program to start a new game.
Finally, hitting select at any time, brings up a graph of life totals for both players over time.
This program depends on my gameboy advance system abstraction library "gbasys": https://github.com/jtsiomb/gbasys Make sure to clone the gbasys source under the same parent directory as gba-mtglife, and build it before trying to build this program.
To build either of them, you're going to need a GBA cross-compiler toolchain like the own from devkitpro (http://devkitpro.org/wiki/Getting_Started/devkitARM) already installed.
To build just type make, and it should produce the mtglife.gba image. You may
type make install to upload the image to the GBA cartridge if you happen to
use the same link cable I'm using (flash2advance). Otherwise you might need to
modify the install target in the makefile or just upload manually. Again with
flash2advance, you can type make run to attempt to upload into the GBA memory
and immediately run a multiboot version of the program (assuming it fits in
RAM). Finally make simrun starts the program in the vbam emulator. Feel free
to change the EMU and EMUFLAGS variables if you wish to use a different
emulator.