mGBA

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Revision as of 17:08, 24 April 2016 by 98.112.38.62 (talk) (Important Features)
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Mgba-logo.png
Current version: 0.4.0
Active: Active
OS: Windows, OS X, Linux
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

0.4.0 Release Notes and Feature list

Twitter Account

Important Features

mGBA is an open-source Game boy Advance emulator written from scratch with portability, accuracy and performance in mind. As of yet, it is the most complete GBA emulation effort.

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)
  • 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