Game Boy Advance emulators

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Revision as of 11:19, 1 July 2014 by Error (talk | contribs) (Added MESS. It supports GBA, but not fully so listed it as not recommended.)
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The Gameboy Advance handheld console

The Game Boy Advance (often shortened to GBA) is a 32-bit handheld video game console developed by Nintendo. It is the successor to the Game Boy Color. It was released in Japan on March 21, 2001; in North America on June 11, 2001; in Australia and Europe on June 22, 2001.

Emulators

PC
Name Operating System(s) Latest Version GB/GBC GBA NDS Game Link Support Libretro Core Recommended
Visual Boy Advance-M (VBA-M) Multi-platform r1231
MESS Multi-platform 0.153 ?
No$GBA Windows, MS-DOS 2.7b
Meteor Linux 1.4
higan Windows, OS X, Linux 0.93
iDeaS Windows, Linux 1.0.4.0
Consoles
Name Operating System(s) Latest Version GB/GBC GBA NDS Game Link Support Libretro Core Recommended
Visual Boy Advance-M (VBA-M) Wii, Gamecube r1229 ✓ (as VBA-Next)
TempGBA4PSP PlayStation Portable 26731013
gpSP PlayStation Portable 0.9

Comparison

Visual Boy Advance-M is the best emulator for the GBA. RetroArch's VBA-Next is based off an older revision of VBA-M with added speedhacks and tweaks, making it a bit less accurate in some respects, though it fixes a few games such as Advance Wars 2. Higan's GBA core is cycle-accurate, but is otherwise very much a WIP and not as compatible as either version of VBA.

The last official release of gpSP was version 0.9 by Exophase. There are, however, two superior forks: gpSPmod and gpSP-J. gpSP-J has superior compatibility, while gpSPmod has more options for customization (full screen, cheats, etc). Both are superior to Kai.

Save file issues

There are a number of different save formats for GBA games. With raw save data, it's very hard to detect what save type it is just by looking at it. Visual Boy Advance tries to autodetect save type but often is incorrect and this causes issues. A fix to this issue is to use a file called "vba-over.ini" to tell VBA what each game's proper save type is, which eliminates most issues regarding save type. Current VBA-M versions come with vba-over.ini by default, but older versions of VBA like VBA 1.7.2 and VBALink did not.

The libretro versions of VBA, libretro-VBA-Next and libretro-VBA-M, come with vba-over.ini baked into the binary so it is able to load raw .sav files, but also changes the save file output to be a 136KB .srm file for every save type, with save type info contained within the file. This completely avoids any save type issues, but makes its save files incompatible with standalone VBA and most other emulators.

Libretro devs created a command line tool to convert libretro-VBA .srm save files to raw .sav save data for other emulators. You can just drag and drop a .srm onto the executable and it will output raw .sav. The same can be done in reverse. A precompiled Windows 64-bit binary of this tool can be found here.