mGBA
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mGBA 0.5.1
Oct 5, 2016
A new release of mGBA, version 0.5.1, is available. This version is a bugfix release, which fixes many issues that weren’t caught before the release of 0.5.0. An extensive list of changes follows after the cut.
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mGBA 0.5.0
Sep 19, 2016
After a long dry spell, a new release of mGBA, version 0.5.0, is available. This is a major feature release, and includes, among other features, Game Boy and Game Boy Color support. There are other enhancements and bugfixes across the board, and an extensive list follows after the cut.
Furthermore, if you enjoy using mGBA and wish to give back, there is now a list of ways to donate on the donations page, including the newly launched mGBA Patreon.
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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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