Handmade
Cyfrowy Nomada is a one-person homebrew studio building brand-new games for Game Boy Color and MS-DOS — platforms the industry declared dead decades ago, but which collectors and players never stopped loving.
Every game is hand-coded in assembly, tested on real hardware, and released as a physical cartridge or floppy disk. No emulators required, no subscriptions, no DLC. Just a cart, a console, and a complete game someone poured their heart into.
What We Make
The studio makes three things: physical Game Boy Color cartridges, MS-DOS floppy disk games, and indie development tools.
Game Boy Color Cartridges
Our Game Boy Color homebrew games ship on real plastic cartridges that work in any original GBC, GBA, or GB Boy. Each cartridge is flashed with a custom-built ROM, labeled with original pixel art, and packaged in a cardboard box with a printed manual. The games are written in Z80 assembly using the RGBDS toolchain, with custom engines built specifically for each title — no off-the-shelf game framework, no emulation fallback.
Cartridges are produced in small umbered runs, typically 50–200 units per title. Once a run sells out, the next batch is queued based on demand. This keeps every release rare enough to be collectible, but available enough that anyone who wants one can get it.
MS-DOS Floppy Disk Games
Our MS-DOS games target the original IBM PC compatible spec — i486 class CPUs, VGA graphics, Sound Blaster audio. They ship on physical 3.5-inch floppy disks with printed covers and instruction booklets. The games boot directly from the floppy, no hard drive installation required, exactly as PC games worked in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
MS-DOS homebrew is a much smaller scene than Game Boy, which makes these releases genuinely scarce. If you collect for vintage PCs — a Tandy 1000, an original Compaq DeskPro, a PS/1, or a period-correct gaming rig — these are some of the only new physical games being made for your hardware today.
Porting Games
Breathing new life into our classic titles by porting beloved games from legacy platforms and languages into Zig — bringing retro experiences forward with modern performance and precision.
Indie Dev Tools
Alongside games, we build and ship the development tools we use ourselves.
Devlog
Free Game Boy Game Boxy Template
Free Game Boy Game Boxy Template
Free Game Boy Game Boxy Template
|Krzysztof Jankowski
Keychains for Game Boy CIB Releases
Keychains for Game Boy CIB Releases
Keychains for Game Boy CIB Releases
|Krzysztof Jankowski
Development Progress Update - 20th July
Development Progress Update - 20th July
Development Progress Update - 20th July
|Krzysztof Jankowski
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How Our Games Are Made
Every Cyfrowy Nomada game is built from scratch — no game engine license, no Unity export, no ROM hack of an existing commercial title.
The development process is closer to how games were made in the late 1980s than how they are made today, with a few modern conveniences layered on top.
Hand-Written Assembly
Game Boy Color games are written in Z80 assembly using RGBDS, the open-source Game Boy assembler that has been the de facto standard for the
homebrew scene since the late 1990s. Assembly is the lowest-level human-readable programming language — every instruction maps directly to a
CPU operation. Writing in assembly means controlling exactly which memory addresses are read, which pixels are drawn, and how many CPU cycles each operation costs. A modern game might use 4 gigabytes of RAM. A Game Boy Color has 32 kilobytes. Every byte matters.
MS-DOS games target 8086/8088 assembly and C, depending on the project. The constraint is similar: the original IBM PC ran at 4.77 MHz and had 256 kilobytes of RAM. Modern design patterns do not apply. You learn to think in tiles, sprites, scanlines, and vblank interrupts — the same mental models developers used thirty-five years ago.
Custom Game Engines
Each game runs on a custom engine built specifically for that title. There is no shared Cyfrowy Nomada engine — Tomblands DX has its own tilemap renderer, Cortex Labs has its own logic-grid solver, Fungus Foray DX has its own procedural plant-growth system. Building the engine per game means the
engine is exactly as complex as the game needs, with no overhead from features the game will never use.
Some of these engines are ports of older personal projects, rewritten and modernized. Worm's Tale, originally released years ago, is being remastered as Below The Bloom. Ultra 6000, Piradice, and Cortex Labs are all being ported to a common Zig + Raylib development pipeline for the modern-desktop version, while the Game Boy Color and MS-DOS releases keep their original assembly cores.
Tested on Real Hardware
Every game is tested on real Game Boy Color hardware — not just emulators. Emulators are forgiving in ways real hardware is not: timing is more lenient, memory access patterns that work in BGB or SameBoy can crash a real cartridge, and screen color eproduction is wildly different. A game that looks perfect in an emulator can show graphics glitches on a real GBC LCD. We test on original hardware with a flasher and SD-enabled cartridge for fast iteration, and we burn the final ROM onto production cartridges for the release.
MS-DOS games are tested on period-correct hardware: an original IBM PC compatible with VGA and Sound Blaster. If a game runs on a 4.77 MHz 8088 with 256K RAM, it will run on anything made since 1981. That is the promise, and we test it before shipping.
Our Journey
Jun '26
Invest in hardware and game engine
Get Game Boy Color, Flasher, empty carts, and SD enabled cart for fast testing.
JUL '26
Develop new simple games 🚩 [we are here]
In production: Cortex Labs (MS-DOS), Fungus Foray DX (GB+GBC). Port old game for PCs.
JUL '26
Packaging and open sell first batch
Finds print shop, design and print test run. Test the final ROMs. Burn them and package boxes. Open the orders.
Aug '26
Get even, next batch production
Get enough profit to pay out all the expenses so far. Produce next batch.
Nov '26
Get Chromatic Console🏁
Sell enough to get Chromatic Console. Enables even easier future test and development. If all goes well, this will mark a start of a new serious business.