poka.sh

 Docs

GBS

Generated by scripts/gen-format-pages.py from docs/data/format-metadata/, FILE_FORMATS.csv and docs/formats-master.csv. Do not edit by hand: change the source, then run the script.

Game Boy Sound Preview.

At a glance
Purpose A Game Boy Sound file: music ripped from a Game Boy game, with the code needed to play it.
Extensions .gbs
Poka parser poka-gbs
Viewer poka-tree-viewer
Depth tier Parser with a shared viewer (see Depth tiers)
Breadth tier B4 Summary (see Breadth tiers)

How much Poka reads

B4 Summary. The container and metadata are read and summarised (counts, properties, structure), but the main content is not rendered.

Confidence: medium (the reviewer read the code). Basis: Reviewed 2026-10-26: read parsers/poka-gbs/src/main.rs (214 lines) and plugin.json. No unit tests or tests/samples.rs, and the corpus has sample.gbs but no test reads it. Covers .gbs. The tree decodes the whole 112-byte header: title, author, copyright, song count and first song, version, load, init and play addresses, stack pointer and the timer registers. Judgement: B4 rather than B5, because the whole header is decoded and checked; nothing of the music (the code and data after the header) is.

What Poka does not read

  • The music is not played or analysed; the code and data after the header are not read
  • Timer settings are shown raw, not turned into a playback rate
  • Per-song titles and lengths are not shown (the header has none)

Libraries

Libraries Poka uses or has assessed for this format, with the status, licence and language the registry records.

  • Game_Music_Emu (libgme) (candidate; LGPL-2.1-or-later; unknown; https://packagehub.suse.com/packages/libgme/) — Multi-format video game music emulator that lists GBS; licence and format taken from the SUSE package page, not upstream; language not stated there.
  • gbsplay (gbsinfo, gbs2gb) (reference; GPL-1.0-or-later; C; https://github.com/mmitch/gbsplay) — copyleft; Player with gbsinfo tool that reads GBS/GBR headers; licence 'GPL v1 or later' per README; language inferred from .c files.
  • gbsdiff (candidate; MPL-2.0; Rust; https://github.com/ISSOtm/gbsdiff) — A tool for highlighting the differences in the execution of two GBS files.; v1.0.1, updated 2024-12-27; matched on lib.rs, not tested

Sources

  • parsers/poka-gbs/src/main.rs
  • parsers/poka-gbs/plugin.json