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- Wisdom Tree (unlicensed)
53
54The following mappers are partially supported:
55
56- MBC6
57- MMM01
58- Pocket Cam
59- TAMA5
60- HuC-1
61- HuC-3
62
63### Planned features
64
65- Networked multiplayer link cable support.
66- Dolphin/JOY bus link cable support.
67- M4A audio mixing, for higher quality sound than hardware.
68- Re-recording support for tool-assist runs.
69- Lua support for scripting.
70- A comprehensive debug suite.
71- e-Reader support.
72- Wireless adapter support.
73
74Supported Platforms
75-------------------
76
77- Windows Vista or newer
78- OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion)[<sup>[3]</sup>](#osxver) or newer
79- Linux
80- FreeBSD
81- Nintendo 3DS
82- Nintendo Switch
83- Wii
84- PlayStation Vita
85
86Other Unix-like platforms, such as OpenBSD, are known to work as well, but are untested and not fully supported.
87
88### System requirements
89
90Requirements 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.
91
92Downloads
93---------
94
95Downloads can be found on the official website, in the [Downloads][downloads] section. The source code can be found on [GitHub][source].
96
97Controls
98--------
99
100Controls are configurable in the settings menu. Many game controllers should be automatically mapped by default. The default keyboard controls are as follows:
101
102- **A**: X
103- **B**: Z
104- **L**: A
105- **R**: S
106- **Start**: Enter
107- **Select**: Backspace
108
109Compiling
110---------
111
112Compiling 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.
113
114#### Docker building
115
116The 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.
117
118To use a Docker image to build mGBA, simply run the following command while in the root of an mGBA checkout:
119
120 docker run --rm -t -v $PWD:/home/mgba/src mgba/windows:w32
121
122This 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:
123
124- mgba/3ds
125- mgba/switch
126- mgba/ubuntu:xenial
127- mgba/ubuntu:bionic
128- mgba/ubuntu:cosmic
129- mgba/ubuntu:disco
130- mgba/ubuntu:eoan
131- mgba/ubuntu:focal
132- mgba/vita
133- mgba/wii
134- mgba/windows:w32
135- mgba/windows:w64
136
137#### *nix building
138
139To use CMake to build on a Unix-based system, the recommended commands are as follows:
140
141 mkdir build
142 cd build
143 cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX:PATH=/usr ..
144 make
145 sudo make install
146
147This 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.
148
149If 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:
150
151 brew install cmake ffmpeg libzip qt5 sdl2 libedit pkg-config
152 mkdir build
153 cd build
154 cmake -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=`brew --prefix qt5` ..
155 make
156
157Note that you should not do a `make install` on macOS, as it will not work properly.
158
159#### Windows developer building
160
161To 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):
162
163For x86 (32 bit) builds:
164
165 pacman -Sy --needed base-devel git mingw-w64-i686-{cmake,ffmpeg,gcc,gdb,libelf,libepoxy,libzip,pkg-config,qt5,SDL2,ntldd-git}
166
167For x86_64 (64 bit) builds:
168
169 pacman -Sy --needed base-devel git mingw-w64-x86_64-{cmake,ffmpeg,gcc,gdb,libelf,libepoxy,libzip,pkg-config,qt5,SDL2,ntldd-git}
170
171Check out the source code by running this command:
172
173 git clone https://github.com/mgba-emu/mgba.git
174
175Then finally build it by running these commands:
176
177 cd mgba
178 mkdir build
179 cd build
180 cmake .. -G "MSYS Makefiles"
181 make
182
183Please 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.
184
185#### Toolchain building
186
187If you have devkitARM (for 3DS), devkitPPC (for Wii), devkitA64 (for Switch), or vitasdk (for PS Vita), you can use the following commands for building:
188
189 mkdir build
190 cd build
191 cmake -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=../src/platform/3ds/CMakeToolchain.txt ..
192 make
193
194Replace the `-DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE` parameter for the following platforms:
195
196- 3DS: `../src/platform/3ds/CMakeToolchain.txt`
197- Switch: `../src/platform/switch/CMakeToolchain.txt`
198- Vita: `../src/platform/psp2/CMakeToolchain.vitasdk`
199- Wii: `../src/platform/wii/CMakeToolchain.txt`
200
201### Dependencies
202
203mGBA 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.
204
205- Qt 5: for the GUI frontend. Qt Multimedia or SDL are required for audio.
206- SDL: for a more basic frontend and gamepad support in the Qt frontend. SDL 2 is recommended, but 1.2 is supported.
207- zlib and libpng: for screenshot support and savestate-in-PNG support.
208- libedit: for command-line debugger support.
209- ffmpeg or libav: for video and GIF recording.
210- libzip or zlib: for loading ROMs stored in zip files.
211- SQLite3: for game databases.
212- libelf: for ELF loading.
213
214SQLite3, libpng, and zlib are included with the emulator, so they do not need to be externally compiled first.
215
216Footnotes
217---------
218
219<a name="missing">[1]</a> Currently missing features are
220
221- OBJ window for modes 3, 4 and 5 ([Bug #5](http://mgba.io/b/5))
222
223<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.
224
225<a name="osxver">[3]</a> 10.8 is only needed for the Qt port. It may be possible to build or running the Qt port on 10.7 or older, but this is not officially supported. The SDL port is known to work on 10.5, and may work on older.
226
227[downloads]: http://mgba.io/downloads.html
228[source]: https://github.com/mgba-emu/mgba/
229
230Copyright
231---------
232
233mGBA is Copyright © 2013 – 2020 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.
234
235mGBA contains the following third-party libraries:
236
237- [inih](https://github.com/benhoyt/inih), which is copyright © 2009 Ben Hoyt and used under a BSD 3-clause license.
238- [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.
239- [LZMA SDK](http://www.7-zip.org/sdk.html), which is public domain.
240- [MurmurHash3](https://github.com/aappleby/smhasher) implementation by Austin Appleby, which is public domain.
241- [getopt for MSVC](https://github.com/skandhurkat/Getopt-for-Visual-Studio/), which is public domain.
242- [SQLite3](https://www.sqlite.org), which is public domain.
243
244If 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.