README.md (view raw)
1mGBA
2====
3
4mGBA 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.
5
6Up-to-date news and downloads can be found at [mgba.io](https://mgba.io/).
7
8[](https://travis-ci.org/mgba-emu/mgba)
9
10Features
11--------
12
13- Highly accurate Game Boy Advance hardware support[<sup>[1]</sup>](#missing).
14- Game Boy/Game Boy Color hardware support.
15- Fast emulation. Known to run at full speed even on low end hardware, such as netbooks.
16- Qt and SDL ports for a heavy-weight and a light-weight frontend.
17- Local (same computer) link cable support.
18- Save type detection, even for flash memory size[<sup>[2]</sup>](#flashdetect).
19- Support for cartridges with motion sensors and rumble (only usable with game controllers).
20- Real-time clock support, even without configuration.
21- Solar sensor support for Boktai games.
22- Game Boy Camera and Game Boy Printer support.
23- A built-in BIOS implementation, and ability to load external BIOS files.
24- Turbo/fast-forward support by holding Tab.
25- Rewind by holding Backquote.
26- Frameskip, configurable up to 10.
27- Screenshot support.
28- Cheat code support.
29- 9 savestate slots. Savestates are also viewable as screenshots.
30- Video and GIF recording.
31- Remappable controls for both keyboards and gamepads.
32- Loading from ZIP and 7z files.
33- IPS, UPS and BPS patch support.
34- Game debugging via a command-line interface and GDB remote support, compatible with IDA Pro.
35- Configurable emulation rewinding.
36- Support for loading and exporting GameShark and Action Replay snapshots.
37- Cores available for RetroArch/Libretro and OpenEmu.
38- Many, many smaller things.
39
40#### Game Boy mappers
41
42The following mappers are fully supported:
43
44- MBC1
45- MBC1M
46- MBC2
47- MBC3
48- MBC3+RTC
49- MBC5
50- MBC5+Rumble
51- MBC7
52
53The following mappers are partially supported:
54
55- MBC6
56- MMM01
57- Pocket Cam
58- TAMA5
59- HuC-1
60- HuC-3
61
62### Planned features
63
64- Networked multiplayer link cable support.
65- Dolphin/JOY bus link cable support.
66- M4A audio mixing, for higher quality sound than hardware.
67- Re-recording support for tool-assist runs.
68- Lua support for scripting.
69- A comprehensive debug suite.
70- e-Reader support.
71- Wireless adapter support.
72
73Supported Platforms
74-------------------
75
76- Windows Vista or newer
77- OS X 10.7 (Lion)[<sup>[3]</sup>](#osxver) or newer
78- Linux
79- FreeBSD
80- Nintendo 3DS
81- Wii
82- PlayStation Vita
83
84Other Unix-like platforms, such as OpenBSD, are known to work as well, but are untested and not fully supported.
85
86### System requirements
87
88Requirements 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.
89
90Downloads
91---------
92
93Downloads can be found on the official website, in the [Downloads][downloads] section. The source code can be found on [GitHub][source].
94
95Controls
96--------
97
98Controls are configurable in the settings menu. Many game controllers should be automatically mapped by default. The default keyboard controls are as follows:
99
100- **A**: X
101- **B**: Z
102- **L**: A
103- **R**: S
104- **Start**: Enter
105- **Select**: Backspace
106
107Compiling
108---------
109
110Compiling 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.
111
112#### Docker building
113
114The 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.
115
116To use a Docker image to build mGBA, simply run the following command while in the root of an mGBA checkout:
117
118 docker run --rm -t -v $PWD:/home/mgba/src mgba/windows:w32
119
120This 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:
121
122- mgba/3ds
123- mgba/switch
124- mgba/ubuntu:xenial
125- mgba/ubuntu:bionic
126- mgba/ubuntu:cosmic
127- mgba/ubuntu:disco
128- mgba/vita
129- mgba/wii
130- mgba/windows:w32
131- mgba/windows:w64
132
133#### *nix building
134
135To use CMake to build on a Unix-based system, the recommended commands are as follows:
136
137 mkdir build
138 cd build
139 cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX:PATH=/usr ..
140 make
141 sudo make install
142
143This 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.
144
145If 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:
146
147 brew install cmake ffmpeg imagemagick libzip qt5 sdl2 libedit pkg-config
148 mkdir build
149 cd build
150 cmake -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=`brew --prefix qt5` ..
151 make
152
153Note that you should not do a `make install` on macOS, as it will not work properly.
154
155#### Windows developer building
156
157To build on Windows for development, using MSYS2 is recommended. Follow the installation steps found on their [website](https://msys2.github.io). 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):
158
159For x86 (32 bit) builds:
160
161 pacman -Sy --needed base-devel git mingw-w64-i686-{cmake,ffmpeg,gcc,gdb,imagemagick,libelf,libepoxy,libzip,pkg-config,qt5,SDL2,ntldd-git}
162
163For x86_64 (64 bit) builds:
164
165 pacman -Sy --needed base-devel git mingw-w64-x86_64-{cmake,ffmpeg,gcc,gdb,imagemagick,libelf,libepoxy,libzip,pkg-config,qt5,SDL2,ntldd-git}
166
167Check out the source code by running this command:
168
169 git clone https://github.com/mgba-emu/mgba.git
170
171Then finally build it by running these commands:
172
173 cd mgba
174 mkdir build
175 cd build
176 cmake .. -G "MSYS Makefiles"
177 make
178
179Please 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.
180
181#### Toolchain building
182
183If you have devkitARM (for 3DS), devkitPPC (for Wii), devkitA64 (for Switch), or vitasdk (for PS Vita), you can use the following commands for building:
184
185 mkdir build
186 cd build
187 cmake -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=../src/platform/3ds/CMakeToolchain.txt ..
188 make
189
190Replace the `-DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE` parameter for the following platforms:
191
192- 3DS: `../src/platform/3ds/CMakeToolchain.txt`
193- Switch: `../src/platform/switch/CMakeToolchain.txt`
194- Vita: `../src/platform/psp2/CMakeToolchain.vitasdk`
195- Wii: `../src/platform/wii/CMakeToolchain.txt`
196
197### Dependencies
198
199mGBA 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.
200
201- Qt 5: for the GUI frontend. Qt Multimedia or SDL are required for audio.
202- SDL: for a more basic frontend and gamepad support in the Qt frontend. SDL 2 is recommended, but 1.2 is supported.
203- zlib and libpng: for screenshot support and savestate-in-PNG support.
204- libedit: for command-line debugger support.
205- ffmpeg or libav: for video recording.
206- libzip or zlib: for loading ROMs stored in zip files.
207- ImageMagick: for GIF recording.
208- SQLite3: for game databases.
209- libelf: for ELF loading.
210
211SQLite3, libpng, and zlib are included with the emulator, so they do not need to be externally compiled first.
212
213Footnotes
214---------
215
216<a name="missing">[1]</a> Currently missing features are
217
218- OBJ window for modes 3, 4 and 5 ([Bug #5](http://mgba.io/b/5))
219
220<a name="flashdetect">[2]</a> 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.
221
222<a name="osxver">[3]</a> 10.7 is only needed for the Qt port. The SDL port is known to work on 10.5, and may work on older.
223
224[downloads]: http://mgba.io/downloads.html
225[source]: https://github.com/mgba-emu/mgba/
226
227Copyright
228---------
229
230mGBA is Copyright © 2013 – 2019 Jeffrey Pfau. It is distributed under the [Mozilla Public License version 2.0](https://www.mozilla.org/MPL/2.0/). A copy of the license is available in the distributed LICENSE file.
231
232mGBA contains the following third-party libraries:
233
234- [inih](https://github.com/benhoyt/inih), which is copyright © 2009 Ben Hoyt and used under a BSD 3-clause license.
235- [blip-buf](https://code.google.com/archive/p/blip-buf), which is copyright © 2003 – 2009 Shay Green and used under a Lesser GNU Public License.
236- [LZMA SDK](http://www.7-zip.org/sdk.html), which is public domain.
237- [MurmurHash3](https://github.com/aappleby/smhasher) implementation by Austin Appleby, which is public domain.
238- [getopt for MSVC](https://github.com/skandhurkat/Getopt-for-Visual-Studio/), which is public domain.
239- [SQLite3](https://www.sqlite.org), which is public domain.
240
241If you are a game publisher and wish to license mGBA for commercial usage, please email [licensing@mgba.io](mailto:licensing@mgba.io) for more information.