mGBA – Game Boy Advance emulator

mGBA is an emulator for running Game Boy Advance games.

It aims to be faster and more accurate than many existing Game Boy Advance emulators, as well as adding features that other emulators lack.

It also supports Game Boy and Game Boy Color games.

The project started in April 2013 with the goal of being fast enough to run on lower end hardware than other emulators support, without sacrificing accuracy or portability

Features include:

• Highly accurate Game Boy Advance hardware support.
• Game Boy/Game Boy Color hardware support although this could be improved, many games don’t work.
• Fast emulation. Known to run at full speed even on low end hardware, such as netbooks.
• Qt and SDL ports for a heavy-weight and a light-weight frontend.
• Local (same computer) link cable support.
• Save type detection, even for flash memory size.
• Support for cartridges with motion sensors and rumble (only usable with game controllers).
• Real-time clock support, even without configuration.
• Solar sensor support for Boktai games.
• Game Boy Camera and Game Boy Printer support.
• A built-in BIOS implementation, and ability to load external BIOS files.
• Turbo/fast-forward support by holding Tab.
• Rewind by holding Backquote.
• Frameskip, configurable up to 10.
• Screenshot support.
• Cheat code support.
• 9 savestate slots. Savestates are also viewable as screenshots.
• Video and GIF recording.
• Remappable controls for both keyboards and gamepads.
• Loading from ZIP and 7z files.
• IPS, UPS and BPS patch support.
• Game debugging via a command-line interface and GDB remote support, compatible with IDA Pro.
• Configurable emulation rewinding.
• Support for loading and exporting GameShark and Action Replay snapshots.
• ELF support.
• Game Boy Camera support.
• Qt: Set default Game Boy colors.
• Game Boy Printer support.
• Super Game Boy support.
• Customizable autofire speed.
• Ability to set default Game Boy model.
• Map viewer.
• Automatic cheat loading and saving.
• GameShark and Action Replay button support.
• AGBPrint support.
• Debugger: Conditional breakpoints and watchpoints.
• Ability to select GB/GBC/SGB BIOS on console ports.
• Optional automatic state saving/loading.
• Access to ur0 and uma0 partitions on the Vita.
• Partial support for MBC6, MMM01, TAMA and HuC-1 GB mappers.
• Cores available for RetroArch/Libretro and OpenEmu.
• Cross-platform support – runs under Linux, FreeBSD, OS X, Windows, Nintendo 3DS, Wii, and PlayStation Vita. Other Unix-like platforms, such as OpenBSD, are known to work as well, but are untested and not fully supported.

Website: mgba.io
Support: Forums, GitHub Code Repository
Developer: Jeffrey Pfau and many contributors
License:Mozilla Public License 2.0

mGBA is written in C. Learn C with our recommended free books and free tutorials.

Return to Video Console Game Emulators

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