Difference between revisions of "MGBA"

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Revision as of 06:00, 18 August 2015

Mgba-logo.png
Current version: 0.3.0
Active: Active
OS: Windows, OS X
Authors: Jeffrey Pfau (endrift)
Official website: mGBA
Source code: GitHub

mGBA is an open source emulator of the Game Boy Advance. The goals are speed and accuracy.

Downloads

Stable and nightlies

Links

0.2.0 Release Notes and Feature list

Twitter Account

Important Features

Overall, either mGBA or VBA-M have each their pros and cons. Even though VBA-M has the edge when it comes to performance, graphical options, debugging features, and ease of use, mGBA is playing catch up while justifying itself with a focus on accuracy, portability, and unemulated features or tweaks that weren't the focus of VBA-M. Despite the lack of options and the lack of a hardware renderer, mGBA is still already usable, with most games playable at full speed, yet it isn't, for the time being, the ideal option.

This emulator aims to be easier to port and maintain than its older counterpart, VBA (or VBA-M). It's present as a Retroarch core. Notable features over other GBA emulators include:

  • Only GBA emulator thus far to load the NES Classic series due to a peculiar DRM system Nintendo implemented for those (which display "Game Pack Error" and crash on start-up for all other GBA emulators)
  • Local link cable support (up to 4 players)
  • Functional Solar Sensor (Boktai series) emulation. Besides no$gba (where this feature is emulated in a limited way), other emulators would need the ROM image to be modified, and the fix isn't very ideal.

The emulator also has functional tilt emulation (WarioWare Twisted, Yoshi's Universal Gravity), and variable rumble emulation (Drill Dozer). Yet their controls are disabled in all current builds and hence unusable for now for the end-user.

Emulator's authors claim they're working on adding more features like:

  • GC/GBA connectivity (with Dolphin), being worked on atm.
  • e-Reader emulation (incomplete in other emulators with no active development as of now).
  • TAS and romhacking oriented options.

Some other perks mGBA offers are:

  • Basic save state support with rewinding.
  • Fast-forwarding is available (TAB key), but not re-mappable to another key like in VBA-M.
  • Very basic cheat code support (AR, GS, CB), no search options.
  • Real-time clock support (used in Pokémon games), with the option to synch it to system time or set it to an arbitrary value.
  • Can patch games at runtime with translation/romhack patches in BPS (beat) format. Like some other GBA emulators, it can also use IPS and UPS (tsukyomi) patches, and load games from zip/7zip archives without the need to uncompress it (unlike no$gba)
  • Can force the game to use specific save formats, but also specific sensors (mostly unemulated altogether in other emulators).
Nintendo Game Boy Advance Emulators