Another request for non-specific information from me: could someone here (even multiple people would be fine!) give me a rundown on GBA utilities that would be useful in terms of both general and translation-specific hacking?

I'm not interesting in game-specific stuff (I'm not knowledgeable enough to learn from it at this point). I am interested in stuff that's not specifically for the GBA but has the capacity to be useful in working on GBA-related projects (such as tile editors that support GBA formats, etc).

I also want to note that I'm not just asking for opinions on what I can find here on RHDN - stuff that isn't directly related to hacking like the DSLazy tool mentioned in this topic definitely falls within my interests.

I realize this is a big request, and I have to admit that an investment of your time into my interests is not likely to pay off further down the line, but I appreciate any info or opinions you can give me. At the very least, I can store it away for a rainy day.

(thank you)

I recommend Tile Molester for graphics editing and WindHex for hex editing. Of course, if you're going to be doing any kind of translation, you'll want Romjuice and Atlas for script extraction and insertion, respectively. And one of Microsoft's Visual .NET Express packages might come in handy if you ever run into anything that requires custom tools.

For GBA-specific hacking, you'll need a powertool. And by that I mean an emulator with some kick-ass, take-names debugging functions. If you don't feel like spending $15 on no$gba (which is the best there is) and you don't mind working with a command prompt, I recommend VBA-SDL-H.

To be brutally honest GBADecmp assumes headers exist and stuff. I'll be releasing my C++ source file that supports the compressions quite well a month or so, I'd suggest editing the source to GBADecmp at least :/