gba emu

gb / gbc / gba emulator witten in c++23.

notable features:

• reasonably accurate gba emulation, most games should just work.
• waitloop detection. can remove most idle loops which improves performance.
• very fast gb/gbc emulation.
• reasonably accurate gb/gbc emulation.
• complete ezflash emulation, this is the only emulator with this feature.

• emulation of most fat devices used in dkp libfat. this means you can access files from a virtual sd card with homebrew. i believe this is the only emulator that supports this.

building

a c++23 compiler is needed (gcc12+ clang15+ msvc12+) and cmake.

sdl2 vcpkg (simple frontend)

cmake --preset sdl2-vcpkg
cmake --build --preset sdl2-vcpkg

imgui vcpkg (complex debugger frontend)

cmake --preset imgui-vcpkg
cmake --build --preset imgui-vcpkg

you can checkout the rest of the presets in

there are a number of presets to help with building

web builds

web builds are the easiest way to quickly test a game. builds are automatically built from master. please report any bugs you find, giving as much info as possible such as browser, os, game etc.

gh-pages version doesn't support threads / mutexs. may crash.

netlify version supports threads / mutexes, won't crash.

yet to implement

list of stuff that i haven't yet implemented. for the most part, everything is done!

ppu

• mosaic bg
• mosaic obj

apu

• correct fifo https://github.com/mgba-emu/mgba/issues/1847

dma

• dma3 special

misc

• correct openbus behaviour
• correct rom access timings
• lots of optimisations. ppu rendering is not optimised at all. dma can be further optimised. mem access can be better optimised for vram and bios access

thanks

• cowbite spec https://www.cs.rit.edu/~tjh8300/CowBite/CowBiteSpec.htm
• gbatek https://problemkaputt.de/gbatek.htm
• tonc https://www.coranac.com/tonc/text/toc.htm
• belogic for apu http://belogic.com/gba/
• dillion for flashmem https://dillonbeliveau.com/2020/06/05/GBA-FLASH.html
• dennis for eeprom https://densinh.github.io/DenSinH/emulation/2021/02/01/gba-eeprom.html
• emudev discord
• jsmolka for their very helpful tests https://github.com/jsmolka/gba-tests
• normmatt (and vba) for the builtin bios https://github.com/Nebuleon/ReGBA/tree/master/bios
• endrift for mgba https://github.com/mgba-emu/mgba
• ocornut for imgui https://github.com/ocornut/imgui
• ocornut for imgui_club https://github.com/ocornut/imgui_club
• everyone that has contributed to the bios decomp https://github.com/Gericom/gba_bios
• xproger for openlara (fixed several bugs in my emu) https://github.com/XProger/OpenLara
• zayd for info on rtc https://beanmachine.alt.icu/post/rtc/
• pokeemerald for a being a good reference https://github.com/pret/pokeemerald
• kenney for the onscreen control buttons https://www.kenney.nl/assets/onscreen-controls
• ifeelfine for yoshi gif https://tenor.com/view/yoshi-bloated-cute-gif-12835998