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arqadium / mgba-net

mGBA-NET – a fork of mGBA with TCP networking on a thin overlay protocol.
Mozilla Public License 2.0
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mGBA

mGBA is an emulator for running Game Boy Advance games. It aims to be faster and more accurate than many existing Game Boy Advance emulators, as well as adding features that other emulators lack. It also supports Game Boy and Game Boy Color games.

Up-to-date news and downloads can be found at mgba.io.

Build status

Features

Game Boy mappers

The following mappers are fully supported:

The following mappers are partially supported:

Planned features

Supported Platforms

Other Unix-like platforms, such as OpenBSD, are known to work as well, but are untested and not fully supported.

System requirements

Requirements are minimal. Any computer that can run Windows Vista or newer should be able to handle emulation. Support for OpenGL 1.1 or newer is also required, with OpenGL 3.2 or newer for shaders and advanced features.

Downloads

Downloads can be found on the official website, in the Downloads section. The source code can be found on GitHub.

Controls

Controls are configurable in the settings menu. Many game controllers should be automatically mapped by default. The default keyboard controls are as follows:

Compiling

Compiling requires using CMake 3.1 or newer. GCC and Clang are both known to work to compile mGBA, but Visual Studio 2013 and older are known not to work. Support for Visual Studio 2015 and newer is coming soon.

Docker building

The recommended way to build for most platforms is to use Docker. Several Docker images are provided that contain the requisite toolchain and dependencies for building mGBA across several platforms.

To use a Docker image to build mGBA, simply run the following command while in the root of an mGBA checkout:

docker run --rm -t -v $PWD:/home/mgba/src mgba/windows:w32

This will produce a build-win32 directory with the build products. Replace mgba/windows:w32 with another Docker image for other platforms, which will produce a corresponding other directory. The following Docker images available on Docker Hub:

*nix building

To use CMake to build on a Unix-based system, the recommended commands are as follows:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX:PATH=/usr ..
make
sudo make install

This will build and install mGBA into /usr/bin and /usr/lib. Dependencies that are installed will be automatically detected, and features that are disabled if the dependencies are not found will be shown after running the cmake command after warnings about being unable to find them.

If you are on macOS, the steps are a little different. Assuming you are using the homebrew package manager, the recommended commands to obtain the dependencies and build are:

brew install cmake ffmpeg libzip qt5 sdl2 libedit pkg-config
mkdir build
cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=`brew --prefix qt5` ..
make

Note that you should not do a make install on macOS, as it will not work properly.

Windows developer building

To build on Windows for development, using MSYS2 is recommended. Follow the installation steps found on their website. Make sure you're running the 32-bit version ("MSYS2 MinGW 32-bit") (or the 64-bit version "MSYS2 MinGW 64-bit" if you want to build for x86_64) and run this additional command (including the braces) to install the needed dependencies (please note that this involves downloading over 1100MiB of packages, so it will take a long time):

For x86 (32 bit) builds:

pacman -Sy --needed base-devel git mingw-w64-i686-{cmake,ffmpeg,gcc,gdb,libelf,libepoxy,libzip,pkg-config,qt5,SDL2,ntldd-git}

For x86_64 (64 bit) builds:

pacman -Sy --needed base-devel git mingw-w64-x86_64-{cmake,ffmpeg,gcc,gdb,libelf,libepoxy,libzip,pkg-config,qt5,SDL2,ntldd-git}

Check out the source code by running this command:

git clone https://github.com/mgba-emu/mgba.git

Then finally build it by running these commands:

cd mgba
mkdir build
cd build
cmake .. -G "MSYS Makefiles"
make

Please note that this build of mGBA for Windows is not suitable for distribution, due to the scattering of DLLs it needs to run, but is perfect for development. However, if distributing such a build is desired (e.g. for testing on machines that don't have the MSYS2 environment installed), running cpack -G ZIP will prepare a zip file with all of the necessary DLLs.

Toolchain building

If you have devkitARM (for 3DS), devkitPPC (for Wii), devkitA64 (for Switch), or vitasdk (for PS Vita), you can use the following commands for building:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=../src/platform/3ds/CMakeToolchain.txt ..
make

Replace the -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE parameter for the following platforms:

Dependencies

mGBA has no hard dependencies, however, the following optional dependencies are required for specific features. The features will be disabled if the dependencies can't be found.

SQLite3, libpng, and zlib are included with the emulator, so they do not need to be externally compiled first.

Footnotes

[1] Currently missing features are

[2] Flash memory size detection does not work in some cases. These can be configured at runtime, but filing a bug is recommended if such a case is encountered.

[3] 10.7 is only needed for the Qt port. The SDL port is known to work on 10.5, and may work on older.

Copyright

mGBA is Copyright © 2013 – 2020 Jeffrey Pfau. It is distributed under the Mozilla Public License version 2.0. A copy of the license is available in the distributed LICENSE file.

mGBA contains the following third-party libraries:

If you are a game publisher and wish to license mGBA for commercial usage, please email licensing@mgba.io for more information.