Emulation A New GBA Emulator is Out. :)

Bart Lemming

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Firstly, I have nothing to do with this. I just thought I'd share the good news. VBA-M finally has some competition. I haven't really done much with it yet but it seems fairly feature packed even for an initial release. Here's the link:

https://endrift.com/mgba/

What do you guys think? Could this replace VBA for you?

:)
 
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Darkipod

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Well,
on his site he says its coded from the ground up in C. I think a linux port would be doable for someone who was familiar with programming for the OS.
 

cearp

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Any review on this emulator?

for me, on my mac, the vba that i was using was not very good. for mac there did not seem to be a good/easy one, maybe i just had to compile it myself.
anyway, when i would play golden sun on it, i noticed the title screen audio was just a tiny tiny bit laggy, the game was perfect it seemed.
i nearly finished the game, then i just stopped and forgot about it. this was 1 and a half years ago.
i wiped my computer + updated. vba would not load my save anymore... it treated my saves as if it was a blank save.
i guess i could load up on windows and test with a more recent vba that i am confident with - but i didn't.

so, i tried out mgba right now, it seems nice, seemed to take a lot less resources than the previous emulator, no title screen lag at all, and most importantly it reads the save that the old emulator couldn't (even though it created it itself lol)
not really a review, but i'm a fan in the first 5 minutes :)
and yeah, reading the classic nes games fixing... wow, he must be a great developer :) we are lucky for people like him
 
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sandytf

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Thank you for pointing out that article. This is a great example of why you should never cut corners when writing an emulator, or any other complex piece of software for that matter. Additionally, the provided insights are probably relevant to many other systems yet to be properly emulated.
 

the_randomizer

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My only beef is there's no bilinear filtering, so on a 1080p screen, the games look too blocky. Will he ever implement filters/shaders?

Edit: Also, why does every game I load yield in a white screen?

Edit 2: Really weird, when I hold tab down, it proceeds in-game, but if I let go, it just pauses the game. You have to pause and unpause. Weird.
 
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Hecatia

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Download the dev builds to get rid of the dills as they are statically linked now.

Anyway a lot of timing fixes and cart prefetch emulation recently got added so it is now both faster and more accurate than VBA.

My only beef is there's no bilinear filtering
Click Audio/Video>Resample Video to turn that on.

Filters and Pixel Shaders are coming soon™
 
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the_randomizer

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Download the dev builds to get rid of the dills as they are statically linked now.

Anyway a lot of timing fixes and cart prefetch emulation recently got added so it is now both faster and more accurate than VBA.


Click Audio/Video>Resample Video to turn that on.

Filters and Pixel Shaders are coming soon™

I just noticed that, yes, so, I'm curious as to how it's faster and more accurate; that sort of balance in emulators is rare and should be a good method for others to adopt in their programs.

And why don't games start up automatically? I have to Pause then Unpause.
 
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Hecatia

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Mostly being written from scratch with new info and knowing what is safe to cut like the optional idle loop detection is the reason for the speed increase.

Games start automatically for me. Are you using a real bios or the built in HLE one?
 

loco365

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mGBA is great, especially that you can record GIFs of gameplay, and it works nicely with IDA Pro if you ROM Hack and whatnot. I actually made use of it in a little project I've been working on to restore e-Reader functionality for international copies of Pokémon FireRed along with some minor assistance from @shinyquagsire23:

Fg42lhj.gif
 

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