mGBA
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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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Cycle Counting, Memory Stalls, Prefetch and Other Pitfalls
Jun 27, 2015
When writing a video game emulator, the first and most foundational step is to implement the system’s CPU. At first glance, this seems to primarily involve implementing the instruction set. After all, the instruction set is what actually specifies what the system does at a basic level. However, just as important, is another feature of the CPU, known as cycles.
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A Call for Developers!
Jun 9, 2015
Have you always wanted to contribute to an emulator? mGBA has reached a point where it is looking for more developers to help with the creation of the next generation Game Boy Advance emulator. As the scope of the project has expanded, the number of potential tasks to make it great has expanded, giving room for new developers to help. If you’d like to help, there are quite a few areas that are open.
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