mGBA
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The Importance of Fuzzing…Emulators?
Sep 13, 2016
Anyone familiar with computer security should be familiar with the concept of fuzzing. You throw garbage data at a program, over and over again, to see if it crashes. If it does, you might have a security issue. It’s a great way to do automated security testing of software, and has uncovered countless critical issues in software across the board. A popular fuzzing framework, American Fuzzy Lop (usually called afl or afl-fuzz for short), even has a “trophy case” for only a small percentage of the bugs it has uncovered—and there are over 150 bugs listed!
Although usually not very intelligent, and limited in the scope of the bugs it can find, fuzzing is a common and effective practice for finding security bugs in software that is complex enough for issues to not be immediately obvious upon source inspection. Being a stochastic process, fuzzing can take a lot of time and careful selection of input cases (for mutational fuzzers) to produce good results. Conversely, it can also be left running processing as a background task for weeks or months with little interaction. As such, fuzzing is often employed in commonly deployed libraries such as libPNG, and widely used software such as Flash. A myriad of different projects use fuzzing to help find bugs, especially as software security comes more to the forefront of engineers’ minds.
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mGBA Patreon
Sep 13, 2016
mGBA now has a Patreon to help fund its development. If you enjoy using mGBA or like the articles I write, I encourage you to pledge. The money helps cover costs of server infrastructure and purchases, and allows me to devote more resources to the emulator and articles I write. Thank you for your consideration!
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mGBA 0.4.1
Jul 11, 2016
A new release of mGBA, version 0.4.1, is available. This version is a bugfix release. An extensive list of changes follows after the cut.
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A Special Surprise: Game Boy Support
Feb 13, 2016
For the past month, I’ve been working on a special surprise to be released with mGBA 0.5: Game Boy support. Although secondary to Game Boy Advance support, mGBA aims to have extremely accurate Game Boy support, eventually cycle accurate. Although still early in development, it already passes a high percentage of many GB accuracy test suites. However, it’s still quite rough around the edges and is not recommended for everyday usage: it’s quite slow due to the aim of cycle-accuracy, and still very buggy. Support will be available in upcoming nightlies, starting tonight.
Please note that this involved a gigantic amount of refactoring, so if you find a bug or regression, please make sure to report it on GitHub. Some features, such as rewinding, have been temporarily removed, but will return before 0.5.0 is released. Furthermore, many features are not yet supported for Game Boy, such as savestates.
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mGBA 0.4.0
Feb 2, 2016
A new release of mGBA, version 0.4.0, is available. This is a major feature release. Some of the more prominent features include official ports to the Nintendo 3DS, Wii, and PlayStation Vita, shader support, an official OpenEmu core for OS X users, and controller hotplugging. An extensive list follows after the cut.
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mGBA 0.3.2
Dec 16, 2015
A new release of mGBA, version 0.3.2, is available. This version is a bugfix release. An extensive list of changes follows after the cut.
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mGBA 0.3.1
Oct 24, 2015
A new release of mGBA, version 0.3.1, is available. This version is a bugfix release. An extensive list of changes follows after the cut.
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Dumping the Undumped
Oct 20, 2015
The Game Boy Advance is an old console. It’s definitely nowhere near the oldest console out there, but it’s had two successors by now, and certainly no one publishes games for it anymore, so it would seem reasonable to assume that each and every Game Boy Advance title has been dumped by one group or another. Maybe there’s an odd edge case here or there for a Mary-Kate and Ashley game’s European release, but everything good or interesting would be dumped within a few years of the console dropping out of popularity. Right? For the most part, right, but it always seems like there’ll be a strange case here or there.
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mGBA Ports: Nintendo 3DS, Wii and PS Vita
Aug 30, 2015
Two of the early goals of mGBA were to make it fast, and to make it portable. A common problem with older emulators is that they tend to be very entrenched in the architecture for which they were originally built. For example, ZSNES and the NO$ emulators have massive amount of x86 assembly directly in the core. Other emulators, like Project 64 and SSF only work on Windows due to their heavy reliance on the operating system’s API. mGBA always sought to be free from any such restrictions by using easily-replaceable, lightweight abstraction layers for any platform-specific code.
With mGBA being portable, and as fast as it is, naturally a question arose of what platforms could it be ported to reasonably well? As it turns out, homebrew on game systems were an excellent target, as there is an already-existing userbase, and the platforms are different enough to stretch the possibilities of how well mGBA can be ported.
mGBA has now been ported to three homebrew platforms: the Nintendo 3DS, the Wii, and the PlayStation Vita. All of these ports are relatively young, but have been merged onto the master branch. As such, nightly builds have been set up, and new builds of mGBA for all three platforms will be available for download every day!
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mGBA 0.3.0
Aug 16, 2015
A new release of mGBA, version 0.3.0, is available. This is a major feature release. Some of the more prominent features include the addition of support for rotation and tilt sensors on controllers with analog sticks, default controller profiles for some of the more common controllers, improved synchronization, the beginning of the debug suite, and much more. An extensive list follows after the cut.
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