What is Reddit's opinion of
mGBA?
From 3.5 billion Reddit comments
100 reviews of this app found across Reddit:
> Virtual Boy
You mean VisualBoyAdvanced? Well, it's faster, more accurate, more secure (yes, that matters with emulators), has support for the Wii, 3DS, and Vita, and much more.
Currently, mGBA is both the most accurate and fastest emulator (E: at least on PC) for the GBA.
I remember learning about this trick when mGBA implemented this. F-Zero's GBA entry uses this flashing effect to produce the transparent mini-maps you see on the screen.
Here's the article: https://mgba.io/2020/01/21/mgba-0.8.0/. Endrift doesn't go into much technical detail here because it's just a feature highlight, but you can see it side by side with the same scene not implementing the effect.
> While medusa is still an alpha quality software, it will be versioned separately from mGBA. Releasing hopefully soon will be mGBA 0.6.0, and on a separate schedule, medusa 0.1.0 will release. Sometime after mGBA 1.0 is released, the medusa branch will be merged back into mGBA and the combined product will become medusa 2.0. This will likely happen sometime in 2018, but that’s still up in the air.
Managed to find it on the medusa announcement post so glad to see my mind isn't playing tricks on me!
If you want some more stuff like that (specifically about Game Boy emulation, too) I’d recommend endrift’s “Holy Grail” articles and also LIJI32’s post on emulating Pinball Deluxe properly.
I wasn't being aggressive, I was being blunt and honest. I'm not always a PR person that peppers all my posts with pleads and apologies. I just told it like it is: without this ROM, it's too risky to make required changes to fix issues like in Magical Drop ( see https://mgba.io/2017/07/31/holy-grail-bugs-2/ ). We'll be a lot more likely to break much more in trying.
I didn't insult anyone. I'm more to blame than most for losing this file, because I did have it at some point. It's how I was able to implement my own DSP based off of blargg's with the knowledge that it was cycle-accurate like his. But it's not as though he made this test and then only sent it to me and no one else.
I'm just basing this off an mGBA article and various comments byuu has said that stuck with me.
From the mGBA article:
> Because higan is the best-known example of a cycle-accurate emulator, it has led to the misconception that cycle accuracy is necessarily extremely slow. However, much of higan’s performance issues are because the emulation is not optimized for speed. This was an intentional decision on byuu’s part to make sure that the code is ultimately readable and understandable, as byuu maintains a strict code as documentation policy.
One such comment from byuu I could readily find:
> There are endless amounts of speed optimizations that won't affect accuracy if done right, but will complicate the code, making it harder to read and harder to reason about, and harder to fix emulation bugs in. And nobody is perfect so all these speedups very often result in bugs in emulators. You see them fixed all the time in changelogs.
Going further down the rabbit hole.
A lot of consoles use different computer chips (ARM, MIPS,...your computer is most likely a x86) as processors, so emulators have to "emulate" these computer chips to turn the game instructions into an intermediate language they will use for output (video, sound,...) and input (your controller, your savegames,...).
But a console is actually made of multiple chips (some in the console, and some on the carts), and they communicate with each other using very precise timings (here's your rabbit hole, Neo). Some emulators, the most famous of which is bsnes by /u/byuu, emulate ALL of them one by one, emulating, not just one console, but actually a whole physical micro-system of multiple chips, and bringing back the output to your screen and speakers.
And then there's HLE and LLE (High and Low Level Emulation), the first of which, takes the "shortcut" to bridge console game instructions into instructions your computer can read faster, while the second will be closer to the above method. (Someone else please chime in on this if you got a better ELI5 ^^ ) Some emulators even have options to recompile (transform) the game code before or while you play to turn it into code your computer can use natively (RPCS3 does it, and Dolpin too to some extant IIRC).
I think /u/endrift could add a good voice to the conversation too, she often dwells with us on this subreddit and works on mGBA, which is a very good (and multiplatform, yeah!) emulator. She wrote some great posts on famous GBA emulation bugs, and has recently been teaming up with Shonumi (GBE+ author), to bring complete emulation of even the most obscure of GBA hardwares.
Honestly, VBA is very outdated, buggy, inaccurate (leading to strange bugs, the internal game stats not being calculated correctly, save issues, and more), plus has security risks.
Honestly, /u/lunatic24 might be a lot better off using mGBA and he can just import his VBA saves (mGBA should also be able to load the rom save as well). It is not only the most accurate GBA emulator, but it performs a lot better than VBA, so less chance that the emulator could cause hiccups in recording.
if he's talking about what I think he's talking about (this), then it's not a caching thing, but a CPU pipeline thing. It does make it significantly harder to emulate as you need to emulate the pipeline stages of the processor rather than simply fetch/decode/execute on the same cycle.
A better GBA emulator is mGBA which just got ported to the 3DS and is open source, constantly getting updates and aims for accuracy.
Works really great, and runs many games. Although suffers from crashes, those are currently being worked on, and every day there's a new release that fixes bugs.
From this page: https://mgba.io/2016/09/13/fuzzing-emulators/
>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!
> ...why? I mean you could get an SSD. Windows 10 and 7 pro come with built-in VMWare that you can run exact versions of Windows 95, 98, XP, etc., for backwards compatibility- with full RAM and such, too (or max amount allowable by the OS, I guess).
First off, if playing older games is your only concern and you want a well built system, you can't do that for $250. Building a basic computer with decent quality parts, monitor, and mouse will be at least $500. No I'm not including a discrete graphics card.
I'm also under the impression that VMWare is similar to emulation, and while I don't know much about it in specific, I know that even really extremely well regarded emulators aren't perfect (take something like mgba, which still has games with serious bugs: https://mgba.io/2018/03/09/holy-grail-bugs-revisited/).
You just can't get the best results without legitimate hardware. Emulation will work for most, but not all people. It's the same argument whenever a new retro system/hdmi upgrade for a retro system comes out. People just keep saying "lol I bought a raspberry pi for $20 and I can do all of this!", and it's met with an eyeroll by everyone else.
These actually used a form of emulation. There's actually a modified NES rom of Legend of Zelda embedded in there. The emulator itself has a ton of safeguards built around it, to make it difficult to run the game in a GBA emulator, as well as to make it difficult to replace the Zelda ROM with another ROM.
All that being said, the Classic NES Series works as an interesting set of tests for and GBA emulators out there.
Most games do work fine but VBA won't emulate them perfectly. It's mostly minor details, like the airship in Final Fantasy 6 being too slow or shadows not being displayed correctly in Golden Sun and other games, but it can cause major issues in newer Pokemon Hacks, due to VBA not being a very accurate GBC emulator.
There's no need to switch if you're satisfied with its performance but it wouldn't hurt either.
If you're interested, you can read more about bugs caused by inaccurate emulation here: "Holy Grail" Bugs in Emulation Part 1 Part 2 Part 3
Well there's also the original VBA. There's also mGBA. It claims to be the "most accurate GBA emulator" no idea what that means, but you might want to try it. Not sure what other GBA emulators for Windows there are.
This page is a write up on how to prevent emulators from running arbitrary code outside of the emulator, and has a couple examples of emulators doing what you described.
Most emulator writers actually strive for this; this article from the perspective of Game Boy emulation discusses it in more detail, as well as highlighting games that will bug out if ran on technically "perfect" emulators.
Second this! A few years ago, I bought a GBA + a flash rom and started hacking on a demo, just to learn. Even if you already know how to code, there's a lot of initial hoops you have to jump thru, but any experience with embedded and/or gamedev helps a lot, and once you get that out of the way - you can just unleash creativity.
You can also use an emulator for development (although there's no other feeling like seeing your code run on the real hardware), or build retro-style for the PC with a simple 2D graphics library like SDL.
Check out /r/gamedev, http://gbadev.org/, http://devrs.com/, https://mgba.io/
Go with emulation
For the GBA i recommend mgba https://mgba.io/
For the DS go with desmume but pick the dev builds because stable ones are outdated and have sound issues with order of ecclesia http://www.emucr.com/2017/07/desmume-git-20170725.html
Dawn of sorrow has some really annoying touch screen gimmicks, but you can remove them with this patch: http://www.romhacking.net/hacks/3408/
The Classic NES series has the most advanced anti-piracy measures of any GBA game. See this article: https://mgba.io//2014/12/28/classic-nes/
You need a highly accurate emulator to play it. Or you could just emulate the NES original.
A suggestion: For emulate GBA choose mgba instead of Visual Boy Advance GX. mgba runs all GBA games fullspeed, the other has performance problems.
https://mgba.io/downloads.html (somehow, that emu isn't in the list)
Also, Scummvm isn't in the emulators list... it's in the Game list. It's an interested emulator/api for graphic adventure games.
Unless you're direly concerned about menu/interface consistency, or some of the more specialised graphical options, mGBA has a perfectly good upstream 3DS port. Since it doesn't need to bother with RetroArch's abstraction layer, it actually has more features in some respects, most notably gyro/accelerometer support for WarioWare: Twisted!
Version 0.7.2 definitely worked without CFW, as per https://mgba.io/2019/05/25/mgba-0.7.2/ . It's not clear if changes since then have caused problems again.
If you really don't want to install b9s+Luma for some reason, you might want to consider trying Pichaxx or the latest Browserhax. Neither of these requires buying anything on the eShop.
It seems like you don't really understand how difficult it is to get games running in an emulator. Especially for beta versions of the software it's not that easy to have a one fit all solution. It's not only that you have to emulate a different architecture (Out-of-order execution PowerPC from IBM for the WiiU) and software/firmware but there is also the problem that different games actually use the hardware in different ways.
For example only with the last game to be released on the WiiU (Breath of the Wild), actually all GPU cores where used.
Apart from that it's also possible that the hardware might not have the expected behavior. If a developer makes use of such bugs in the hardware then it's extremely difficult to find them and also emulate the bug but other games might not work at all if the emulation gets too accurate. You can read more about that topic here: https://mgba.io/2017/05/29/holy-grail-bugs/
The problem with the 30fps isn't that it's not possible to run the game on a higher fps. I personally already had BotW running at 60fps but with the major downside that the game also was twice as fast. If you develop for a specific platform, then it's not uncommon to link the fps to all the other counters/timings in the game. If the game dips in fps it also slows down. That might be something that the dev actually wants if the console can't keep up. It's hard to impossible to unlink all of those in such complex games as BotW and emulate at a different fps rate then the game was originally designed for. It might be done in the futue but for now we should appreciate that the game runs without a problem at 4K and with more stable FPS then on the console.
But I can agree with you, that the video isn't really telling anything new.
I use mGBA which you can run as .3dsx from the hombrew menu or install as a cia. But since you have CFW you should consider using a Virtual Console Injector so you can install each game and run them from the home screen.
i recommend mGBA! it's known to be a more accurate GBA emulator than VBA is, but it also has a VBA compatibility mode for romhacks that were developed with VBA in mind.
Uhm this piece is just a bunch of photo’s and gif’s placed together to make a composition. But I’ve randomized the game with the universal randomizer: https://pokehacks.dabomstew.com/randomizer/
I play the rom on the mgba emulator: https://mgba.io
I hope this was helpful ☺️
It's actually mGBA! It's a lot more accurate than VBA and runs better too. Saving didn't work in Mednafen's mGBA for some dumb reason idk. But using mGBA's official app works perfectly (picture looks weird until you set the correct video options, after that it looks crisp!)
Legally, the only affordable option is Wii U VC, but only if you already have a Wii U ~~or wait for the uncomfirmed legacy collection like the rest of us.~~
You could also try looking for the physical games on eBay or other mediums for second-hand purchases available in your area, but they'd likely be very expensive.
I do not condone piracy, but if you have purchased the games legally in the past, then I recommend the mGBA emulator (compatible with Windows, macOS, and Ubuntu).
The emulator experience, however, is not very good compared to the original GBA/GBASP, or even DS/DSLite. If you still have a GBA/GBASP/DS/DSLite, then I recommend getting a flashcart to play the games in them.
Note that it's technically still illegal to download ROMs, but you're not going to get hounded for it, and I wouldn't consider it unethical if you have legitimately purchased the games in the past (even if you lost them since then).
I'm glad you're playing the game, but for the love of all that is holy, do not use VBA. Use mGBA. VBA is a horrible emulator for a multitude of reasons, it hasn't been updated in sixteen years and it has security vulnerabilities. mGBA runs better on most hardware, is much more accurate, has a better interface, and won't give hackers an easy backdoor to your computer. There's simply no reason to ever use VBA, especially when development was picked up by the VBA-M team to improve the emulator in every conceivable way.
VBA and mGBA use the same save format, so you'll be able to pick up where you left off.
mGBA is probably the best one now.
All you need to do is download the latest development version from their official website, installer or portable version, for your OS.
Just unpack/install. GBA game rom files need to be found elsewhere. No bios files are required.
Can you show us screenshots, or a video, or any other details? "A GBA emulator" isn't exactly descriptive.
To start, the best GBA emulator is mGBA. Try that, and see if your problem goes away. There's a chance you're just using a shitty second-rate emulator or something. If not, I'd be happy to help if we have some more details.
There is a n64 emulator but it runs bad, not worth your time. There are official ports of some games like ocarina of time. There is no gamecube emulator and there never will be one or atleast not one that is usable.
For GBA you can use injects here is a guide for that https://www.cfwaifu.com/3ds-install-roms/
For NES, SNES, Sega mega drive/ master system and PC-engine use the emulators made by bubble2k16 https://github.com/bubble2k16
For GB/GBC there is mgba https://mgba.io/downloads.html
It uses a form of bank switching, since it requires way more than the maximum 32MB of ROM the GBA maps into memory. I believe endrift studied this stuff years ago. The tool on that page should work, but I haven't tested it myself.
Consider using mGBA instead. It's more accurate than NO$GBA and it has an official native Mac version.
I'm not sure if you can use the NO$GBA .sav directly with it, but if it doesn't work there should be an online converter to convert it.
First, follow https://3ds.guide, then look into mGBA.
Alternatively, you could also use the Ultimate GBA VC Injector, but it's pretty outdated (the author is working on a new version, but it's taking a while)
Something seems wrong on your side, because I updated 2 days ago and it's loading all savefiles fine, including ones made on an Android GBA emulator.
Have you tried redownloading the archive, or using a development release?
This is the developer's website, so that's the source right there. You'll need 7-Zip to extract the .7z archive, and that program is also free. If I remember right, you will also need to install either Visual C++ or Visual Basic runtimes from Microsoft's website... I can't remember which one mGBA requires.
For GBA (and GB) on Vita, I would recommend mGBA.
Otherwise, I would recommend Retroarch, especially until Adrenaline works out PSX support. Here's a GBAtemp thread that labels each emulator in Retroarch and gives a general idea for performance.
You should try Visual Boy Advance M. (VBA-M)
VBA-M is consistently being developed and polished with new features.
Official Link: https://sourceforge.net/projects/vbam/
I can also recommend trying out mGBA nothing else works: https://mgba.io/about.html
The emulation wiki has some emulators listed, and is recommending mGBA. Other than it and the emus you listed you don't have much choice.
Its SourceForge page is still up.
...But you really shouldn't be using VBA-M anymore. mGBA has surpassed it in pretty much every way- I recommend switching.
If VBA-M runs well for you, there's no reason to switch. It's not a bad emulator. However, I'd generally recommend mGBA over VBA-M as it's both faster and more accurate. You may not necessarily notice this during normal gameplay, though.
As for filters, that's a very subjective topic. I personally prefer to have my visuals as clear as possible, hence no filters at all for me. I like the grainy, pixelated look more than the overly polished image most filters tend to produce.
I suggest trying out mGBA for GBA emulation if you're having problems with VBA*
>VBAM is universally agreed upon as the best emulation software for GBA
mGBA is still pretty new, but it's already quite a bit more accurate than VBA-M, though VBA-M is accurate enough to play nearly all games without problem.
Only real downside to mGBA that I know of is that it has less ~~eye candy~~ features than VBA-M.
If you do use mGBA, make sure to download the latest nightly build since there have been fixes specifically for FFVI that have not been released in stable yet.
Honestly not sure what to say about your save issue other than ask VBA-M developers. Savestates could be broken in 2.0b1, in which case you'd likely be screwed. If the savestates are fine and the issue has been fixed in their git, you can try to apply the patch to the 2.0b1 source or just build the latest git and hope savestates are still compatible.
I haven't tested the roms offered, however, I would suggest using the roms present in the megathread (follow the automod-bot link) as they are known to be reliable, tested, audited, etc.
probably mGBA (Windows, linux, macOS) will be the best option to play them.
https://mgba.io/downloads.html
finally, as suggested by colleague u/RampartChat Emulation General Wiki is your best source of information about emulators on the internet.
cheers!
When writing to the STAT register there are actually circumstances in which an interrupt will spuriously trigger without any of the STAT IRQ conditions being fulfilled. As with seemingly all obscure hardware bugs there are games that rely on this bug as well. A commonly cited game is Legend of Zerd (ザードの伝説, also known as Legend of Xerd or Zerd no Densetsu), which immediately crashes if the bug is not emulated. Likewise, the game will not run on a Game Boy Color since the bug was fixed.
FireRed is a GBA game, so you want a GBA emulator. One I've used in the past is mGBA. Once you have the emulator installed, you need the ROM. Think of that like the game cartridge, but digital. I'm not going to link to a FireRed ROM because of copyright reasons and Reddit's rules, but they're not hard to find. You can usually search something like 'GameBoy Advance ROMs' and find some decent sites with a large listing of games.
You download or legally create the ROM, start up mGBA, and then tell it to load the ROM. Bam, you're playing FireRed!
Controls depend on settings, and may take some getting used to but it's often WASD or arrow keys for movement. You can change those in the emulator settings, too.
Oh, good point.
/u/Substantial_Ad7698 You don't need wine for this. mGBA is a GBA emulator that supports windows, linux and mac. Just download the version built for your operating system and it should work without the help of wine.
mgba is now by far the most preferred GBA emulator. It's more accurate and faster than VBA-M, and emulates almost all extra peripherals which VBA-M can't at all. Plus the dev is a very active redditor. /r/emulation maintains a good list of recommended emulators: https://www.reddit.com/r/emulation/wiki/index
u/XachzryaCeroyx Endrift(developer of mGBA) wrote a fantastic article on why MMBN4 had issues. Woodman Scenario was unplayable on the original DS...and ONLY the original DS.
"Holy Grail" Bugs in Emulation, Part 1 - mGBA
Nintendo made the Nintendo DS. They didn't think a slight revision in hardware was going to affect certain GBA games. Normally this isn't a problem, but Capcom did some poor coding which only worked with the original hardware. Nintendo fixed it with the DS Lite and the Wii U version and officially acknowledged in on their website.
>Mega Man Battle Network 4: Blue Moon Version
Game Locks Up when played on Nintendo DS
This is a known incompatibility between the game and the Nintendo DS. Unfortunately, this game cannot be played properly on the Nintendo DS and should instead be played on the Game Boy Advance, Game Boy Advance SP, or Game Boy Player.
On the emulation side, why the bug occurs was figured out by Martin Korth(NO$GBA Developer) back in 2015. NO$GBA and mGBA were the first emulators to implement this bug fix. I like to think other emulators have included the fix since then, but I only use mGBA.
Worse case scenario, there is a patch for the Woodman glitch, though I've never needed it.
There's an excellent fan translation made by Tomato. If you want to emulate it, just Google "Mother 3 GBA ROM" and click the first result. (I would highly recommend (this emulator)[https://mgba.io). You could also purchase a repro cart of the English translation if you want to play on genuine hardware. They're pretty cheap and easy to find.
A few of the topics here are differences in Gameboys:
https://mgba.io/2017/05/29/holy-grail-bugs/
Specifically a register bug fixed on GBC that Legend of Zerd uses, and a memory bug for MegaMan Battle Network 4 that causes issues on the regular DS
In my experience, mGBA is pretty damn good. It supports tons of weird hardware features out of the box that most emulators require specific patches to work around (such as solar sensor emulation for the Boktai series). I've never used it for running ROMhacks though. I've heard some ROMhacks were actually only made for specific emulators, and only work in that environment because they rely on flaws in the emulation (and thus wouldn't work even on real hardware). But barring that, mGBA includes real-time patching, so I imagine it supports ROMhacks fine.
What you're basically asking for is to use Dolphin as a Game Boy Player.
The GBA integration doesn't allow for that kind of functionality yet. It's only for allowing GBA-GCN connectivity, not standalone GBA playing.
You'll need to use a standalone emulator for the time being. mGBA would give the same functionality as a hypothetical Player implementation.
You can try mGBA 0.9.2 (https://mgba.io/downloads.html) and I’m not exactly sure how to convert the save file for a different emulator. If it’s a save-state then I think you could be out of luck because I think that’s emulator-dependent. If it’s a battery save, it could be as simple as changing the file extension from whatever OpenEmu uses to .sav for mGBA.
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Because I spent two weeks figuring out what the issue was and making absolute certain I had it right so that the fix wouldn't break other games. Most behaviors are trivial to add to emulators once they're known, but you find them out by focusing on that accuracy in the first place.
Funny story, endrift ran into the exact same type of bug with the GBA, and it was just as difficult to solve: https://mgba.io/2020/01/25/infinite-loop-holy-grail/
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Classic NES series use a bunch of programming tricks as copy protection to prevent playing on all kinds of platforms (flash cards, emulators), it's probable that you're running into one of these measures. It looks like No-Intro considers the 1 MByte version of that ROM the correct one, while on the Everdrive forums people are saying that the 4 MByte ones No-Intro considers overdumped are working. Have you tried a dump with the MD5 of 23B2EFCD1FAB512D615F99A2D1A11D00 for Super Mario Bros yet?
From personal experience both the GB and GBA cores seem accurate.
The GB core will play some holy grail bug games like Pinball Fantasies
The GBA core can play one of these holy grail games as well and possibly others since that comment was made.
Based off of that I’d say the GB/GBA cores are just as accurate if not more accurate than the most accurate software emulators.
Probably not. The footage in that video might have been recorded before mGBA 0.8.4, and there are two fixes to XQ Audio according to the changelog but it's almost definitely not enough to make the feature completely perfect.
Yes it's safe, accurate, and simple.
However, not all rom hacks may be fully supported due to how they were coded for specific emulator bahavior in older emulators.
Official Site: https://mgba.io/
Source Code: https://github.com/mgba-emu/mgba
GBA, unfortunately, is a little more hit and miss. Some stuff runs fine and other stuff doesn't. mGBA runs better than any of the cores in Retroarch, but still isn't perfect. I have heard good things about gpSP Kai, but haven't tried it yet.
Long story short: many games (most?) are totally playable, but I wouldn't call it a perfect experience at all.
Unfortunately, not yet. A version that would support it (mgba 0.10.0) is marked with an ETA of Mid 2021. For now, BizHawk seems to be the best choice with Lua scripting.
It wouldn't be much of an emulator if you couldn't run the software without triggering anti-piracy, lmao. Ironically enough the way most emulators get around anti-emulation code (intentionally or not) is by being accurate enough for it to be indistinguishable from real hardware to the software.
Mario Galaxy 2 has no anti piracy anyway. Have fun.
copying over my response from another comment:
an emulator, either mGBA or VisualBoyAdvance work for GBA on windows should work, they're both pretty reliable. MyBoy is on android too, on the play store
for ds, Desmume or MelonDS works, though i hear melonds is hard to set up. Drastic works on android too
it should be fine to get roms from wherever, just make sure it's not a .exe file or something. gba roms are either a .gba file, or a ZIP folder containing a .gba file. (the emulators themselves are exe files though)
as for a hard game...well most of the pokemon games arent hard, but platinum and black 2 are probably the hardest. there are also rom hacks that up the difficulty too, namely renegade platinum, blaze black / volt white, and sacred gold / storm silver. they also add a lot of quality of life features, so check them out!
copying over my response from another comment:
an emulator, either mGBA or VisualBoyAdvance work for GBA on windows should work, they're both pretty reliable. MyBoy is on android too, on the play store
vimm's lair is a safe site for roms, i've used it lots. the interface is kinda spooky lol but it should be fine, you can just navigate to the gba section.
it should be fine to get roms from wherever, just make sure it's not a .exe file or something. gba roms are either a .gba file, or a ZIP folder containing a .gba file. (the emulators are exe files though)
the roms themselves aren't there, but r/PokemonROMHacks is a sub all about romhacks if you have any more questions! for an emulator, either mGBA or VisualBoyAdvance work for GBA on windows, they're both pretty reliable. MyBoy is on android too.
hacks are usually posted on Pokecommunity from what i've seen, which should be safe (unless there's a bunch of comments saying "wtf this gave me a virus" or something lol). if you just search the hack you're looking for in google you should find it pretty easily.
the hacks themselves are usually an .ips or .ups file, or a ZIP that includes one of the two. use a patcher to combine the base rom with the hack (lunar ips for ips files, upset for ups files). it'll ask for the rom & the patch file, should be pretty self explanatory from there.
as long as you aren't downloading a .exe file, it should be all good! we can't link any rom files here though, you're on your own for that
I'm fully aware that the last thing anyone wants to hear when they ask a question is "don't do this do this instead" but mGBA will probably solve your problem.
There's enough reasons to ditch VBA for mGBA to fill a dictionary front to back, there's practically no justification for VBA in 2020. But if I really had to make an attempt to specifically solve you're problem, it's something to do with whatever graphics API you're using, either OpenGL or Software isn't agreeing with your video card. Update your video card drivers if applicable ~~and then drag VBA into the Recycle Bin.~~
VBA hasn't been updated in 16 years and has security flaws that could give someone with malicious intent access to your PC, use mGBA. It's in active development and runs incredibly well
MelonDS (DS emulator) has local multiplayer. http://melonds.kuribo64.net/
mGBA (GB/GBC/gBA emulator) has link cable emulation. https://mgba.io/
Both of them have local multiplayer only. So you can't battle people over internet.
First download an GBA emulator. I use mGBA. Then I just followed the instructions in the opening post of this thread. The hardest part would probably be patching the ROM but the video tutorial in the thread post was quite useful. If you have any other questions, don't hesitate to ask, the game is a lot of fun.
There is a patch to remove the judges and law system: http://www.romhacking.net/hacks/941/
It makes for a much less aggravating experience for those who just want to play a more "standard" FFTA. Try it out and see if that helps. You'll obviously have to emulate. I recommend No$GBA or mGBA.
Oh, I think I was wrong about AM2R, sorry.
To emulate GBA games, you just need to download an emulator (like this one), p*rate the game, then have the emulator run it. It should recognize your controller and let you configure your controls among other things. Same deal for the DS games.
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What emulator are you using? If you're using VBA or any derivative of it, please stop now and switch to https://mgba.io. VBA's emulation mediocrity is well-known in the ROM hacking community and many hackers refuse to support players using VBA.
The go to emulator for GBA speedruns is mGBA
It has an option to play at the native console framerate so that timing matches a real console for the most part. Check with the community of course but that should be what they use if they allow EMU
Adding on to this to explain why some games just simply don't work or have substantial bugs on existing emulators:
Emulators are extremely complex programs trying to provide a cozy environment for equally complex programs. Understanding hardware well enough to mimic it in software is tough, and the assumptions and tricks people use are not always accurate.
When creating an emulator, you need documentation. Sometimes, there's public documentation that explains the more common hardware components. Maybe it's the CPU instruction set, or maybe someone did some work for you. Everything else though... you're going to need to figure that out yourself through clean room (i.e. legal) reverse engineering. That takes significant time and skill, and it comes with absolutely no guarantee of correctness.
For every possible input to some circuit (e.g. GPU), someone has to determine through trial and error how it influences the circuit's output. An analogy to that would be like like leaving a toddler and a dog in a room full of cookies and raw chicken, and then trying to figure out which one ate what without actually witnessing what happened.
And then, once that's done, you're still not free from compatibility issues. Some consoles have completely documented hardware, yet the software developed for the console actively uses undocumented but reproducible bugs in the hardware implementation. If you're lucky, it's something easy to debug that can be fixed with a clever trick. But when you're not, you end up with something like this that requires luck and a lot of knowledge about the system.
Your problem is that it's VisualBoyAdvance.
VisualBoyAdvance is horribly outdated and inaccurate. The last stable release was sixteen years ago. VBA-M and VBA-Next are slightly better.
For your own sake, use mGBA. It'll both fix your saving problem and solve the syphilis you will likely contract from using VBA.
VBA GX and MGBA don't (currently) support reading from the advance game port hardware. Theoretically it could be added (I own an Advance Game Port, and the way it works has been reverse-engineered), but it's not a thing now. It's also possible to dump games ahead of time using the Advance Game Port hardware and then run them in a normal emulator, but the exact process is awkward (involving manually modifying cleanrip based on the stuff here).
The one benefit AGP has is that you can directly work with the cart.
Another thing is that Advance Game Port's disc is blocked since System Menu 3.0 (I think at least; wiibrew says MIOS v5). There are ways of working around this, but it's also annoying to do.
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There's a series of blogpost about many emulator bugs that stemmed from not anticipating some very specific undocumented behaviours of the original hardware (GB, GBA and SNES): https://mgba.io/tag/debugging/
Just use mGBA (https://mgba.io/). Or alternatively, Retroarch which is like a big bundle of emulators (including mGBA) Perfectly safe, works great, available for every platform you could want it on.
Online emulator sites are super sketchy and often filled to the brim with malware and intrusive ads. If you feel bad about pirating a game, you should feel even worse about some unrelated party making ad money off of it.
Not on RetroArch, but you can simulate a GBA Link Cable connection between two emulated GBA games (on the same host device) using the standalone version of mGBA, apparently (haven't tried it myself). Perhaps you can try converting your .sav to an .srm, create a separate .srm game file, then launch 2 instances of FireRed to trade with yourself on mGBA?
Oh and, I really doubt this would work (backup your save before trying this!), but you could also try loading your save file with a modified version of FireRed? Universal Pokemon Randomizer program has a setting that substitutes Trade Evolutions with level-up evolutions and other alternatives.
Alright. RetroArch uses "cores", it kinda allows you to install the emulators you want, à la carte. When you install it and set it up, you go to "download cores" and select the core you want. The best one for game boy and game boy advance is Gambatte, you can install it as a core within RetroArch, or just find the standalone app.
Best game boy advance emulator (when I say "best", I mean as per the general consensus) is mGBA. Again, find it here, standalone, or download in within RetroArch.
edit : here's a cool little guide for RetroArch. Plenty of other guides out there, and plenty of users who'll happily help you if you need info
edit 2: Here is Dolphin, the best Gamecube emulator.
This mGBA post about cycle counting and instruction prefetch might be worth a read. All in all cycle counting on the GBA is a really hard topic and there are few people out there which are qualified to answer your question. If you are still in early development I suggest focusing on other parts of the system. GBA games don't require a cycle accurate emulator to run well (just make sure your CPU isn't running too fast).
Sorry this bad answer but better cycle accuracy is still on my own todo list and I couldn't leave your question unanswered :)
Depends a bit on your distribution, I'm assuming it is Ubuntu.
For GB/C/A games, I suggest using mGBA. The part about DeSmuME seems to be unchanged. The only difference being that I would suggest building from source using the GitHub repo as it seems to be more up to date. You still have to consult the wiki, if you're new to compiling stuff, though. The UPS patcher from the guide still works as does the IPS patch perl script.
OpenEmu uses cores from Gambatte for Game Boy/Game Boy Color and mGBA for Gameboy Advance. mGBA also runs Gameboy and Gameboy Color games. Those would be your best bet. If the latest versions of those don't run on Sierra, they should have older versions available that will. You could also check out the OpenEmu Github releases page where all the previous versions are listed. I'm not sure how far back you'd have to go, but one of them should work.
The classic nes gba games are surprisingly copy protected. https://mgba.io/2014/12/28/classic-nes/ You should look for some patches to remove it from the old gba flashcart days. I remember patching all the roms a long time ago with something to make then work on my flashcart back then.
This probably means that there's something wrong with either the game's flash memory (where the game stores save data) or its IR sensor. https://mgba.io/2017/07/31/holy-grail-bugs-2/ refers to this screen appearing when a DS emulator developer was debugging some problems with Black/White.
Perhaps a fake cart?