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, GIF, WebP, and APNG recording.
31- e-Reader support.
32- Remappable controls for both keyboards and gamepads.
33- Loading from ZIP and 7z files.
34- IPS, UPS and BPS patch support.
35- Game debugging via a command-line interface and GDB remote support, compatible with IDA Pro.
36- Configurable emulation rewinding.
37- Support for loading and exporting GameShark and Action Replay snapshots.
38- Cores available for RetroArch/Libretro and OpenEmu.
39- Many, many smaller things.
40
41#### Game Boy mappers
42
43The following mappers are fully supported:
44
45- MBC1
46- MBC1M
47- MBC2
48- MBC3
49- MBC3+RTC
50- MBC5
51- MBC5+Rumble
52- MBC7
53- Wisdom Tree (unlicensed)
54- Pokémon Jade/Diamond (unlicensed)
55- BBD (unlicensed MBC5-like)
56- Hitek (unlicensed MBC5-like)
57
58The following mappers are partially supported:
59
60- MBC6 (missing flash memory write support)
61- MMM01
62- Pocket Cam
63- TAMA5 (missing RTC support)
64- HuC-1 (missing IR support)
65- HuC-3 (missing RTC and IR support)
66
67### Planned features
68
69- Networked multiplayer link cable support.
70- Dolphin/JOY bus link cable support.
71- MP2k audio mixing, for higher quality sound than hardware.
72- Re-recording support for tool-assist runs.
73- Lua support for scripting.
74- A comprehensive debug suite.
75- Wireless adapter support.
76
77Supported Platforms
78-------------------
79
80- Windows Vista or newer
81- OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion)[<sup>[3]</sup>](#osxver) or newer
82- Linux
83- FreeBSD
84- Nintendo 3DS
85- Nintendo Switch
86- Wii
87- PlayStation Vita
88
89Other Unix-like platforms, such as OpenBSD, are known to work as well, but are untested and not fully supported.
90
91### System requirements
92
93Requirements 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.
94
95Downloads
96---------
97
98Downloads can be found on the official website, in the [Downloads][downloads] section. The source code can be found on [GitHub][source].
99
100Controls
101--------
102
103Controls are configurable in the settings menu. Many game controllers should be automatically mapped by default. The default keyboard controls are as follows:
104
105- **A**: X
106- **B**: Z
107- **L**: A
108- **R**: S
109- **Start**: Enter
110- **Select**: Backspace
111
112Compiling
113---------
114
115Compiling 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.
116
117#### Docker building
118
119The 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.
120
121To use a Docker image to build mGBA, simply run the following command while in the root of an mGBA checkout:
122
123 docker run --rm -t -v $PWD:/home/mgba/src mgba/windows:w32
124
125This 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:
126
127- mgba/3ds
128- mgba/switch
129- mgba/ubuntu:xenial
130- mgba/ubuntu:bionic
131- mgba/ubuntu:focal
132- mgba/ubuntu:groovy
133- mgba/vita
134- mgba/wii
135- mgba/windows:w32
136- mgba/windows:w64
137
138#### *nix building
139
140To use CMake to build on a Unix-based system, the recommended commands are as follows:
141
142 mkdir build
143 cd build
144 cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX:PATH=/usr ..
145 make
146 sudo make install
147
148This 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.
149
150If 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:
151
152 brew install cmake ffmpeg libzip qt5 sdl2 libedit pkg-config
153 mkdir build
154 cd build
155 cmake -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=`brew --prefix qt5` ..
156 make
157
158Note that you should not do a `make install` on macOS, as it will not work properly.
159
160#### Windows developer building
161
162##### MSYS2
163
164To 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):
165
166 pacman -Sy --needed base-devel git ${MINGW_PACKAGE_PREFIX}-{cmake,ffmpeg,gcc,gdb,libelf,libepoxy,libzip,pkgconf,qt5,SDL2,ntldd-git}
167
168Check out the source code by running this command:
169
170 git clone https://github.com/mgba-emu/mgba.git
171
172Then finally build it by running these commands:
173
174 mkdir -p mgba/build
175 cd mgba/build
176 cmake .. -G "MSYS Makefiles"
177 make -j$(nproc --ignore=1)
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##### Visual Studio
182
183To build using Visual Studio is a similarly complicated setup. To begin you will need to install [vcpkg](https://github.com/Microsoft/vcpkg). After installing vcpkg you will need to install several additional packages:
184
185 vcpkg install ffmpeg[vpx,x264] libepoxy libpng libzip sdl2 sqlite3
186
187Note that this installation won't support hardware accelerated video encoding on Nvidia hardware. If you care about this, you'll need to install CUDA beforehand, and then substitute `ffmpeg[vpx,x264,nvcodec]` into the previous command.
188
189You will also need to install Qt. Unfortunately due to Qt being owned and run by an ailing company as opposed to a reasonable organization there is no longer an offline open source edition installer for the latest version, so you'll need to either fall back to an [old version installer](https://download.qt.io/official_releases/qt/5.12/5.12.9/qt-opensource-windows-x86-5.12.9.exe) (which wants you to create an otherwise-useless account, but you can bypass temporarily setting an invalid proxy or otherwise disabling networking), use the online installer (which requires an account regardless), or use vcpkg to build it (slowly). None of these are great options. For the installer you'll want to install the applicable MSVC versions. Note that the offline installers do not support MSVC 2019. For vcpkg you'll want to install it as such, which will take quite a while, especially on quad core or less computers:
190
191 vcpkg install qt5-base qt5-multimedia
192
193Next, open Visual Studio, select Clone Repository, and enter `https://github.com/mgba-emu/mgba.git`. When Visual Studio is done cloning, go to File > CMake and open the CMakeLists.txt file at the root of the checked out repository. From there, mGBA can be developed in Visual Studio similarly to other Visual Studio CMake projects.
194
195#### Toolchain building
196
197If you have devkitARM (for 3DS), devkitPPC (for Wii), devkitA64 (for Switch), or vitasdk (for PS Vita), you can use the following commands for building:
198
199 mkdir build
200 cd build
201 cmake -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=../src/platform/3ds/CMakeToolchain.txt ..
202 make
203
204Replace the `-DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE` parameter for the following platforms:
205
206- 3DS: `../src/platform/3ds/CMakeToolchain.txt`
207- Switch: `../src/platform/switch/CMakeToolchain.txt`
208- Vita: `../src/platform/psp2/CMakeToolchain.vitasdk`
209- Wii: `../src/platform/wii/CMakeToolchain.txt`
210
211### Dependencies
212
213mGBA 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.
214
215- Qt 5: for the GUI frontend. Qt Multimedia or SDL are required for audio.
216- SDL: for a more basic frontend and gamepad support in the Qt frontend. SDL 2 is recommended, but 1.2 is supported.
217- zlib and libpng: for screenshot support and savestate-in-PNG support.
218- libedit: for command-line debugger support.
219- ffmpeg or libav: for video, GIF, WebP, and APNG recording.
220- libzip or zlib: for loading ROMs stored in zip files.
221- SQLite3: for game databases.
222- libelf: for ELF loading.
223
224SQLite3, libpng, and zlib are included with the emulator, so they do not need to be externally compiled first.
225
226Footnotes
227---------
228
229<a name="missing">[1]</a> Currently missing features are
230
231- OBJ window for modes 3, 4 and 5 ([Bug #5](http://mgba.io/b/5))
232
233<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.
234
235<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.
236
237[downloads]: http://mgba.io/downloads.html
238[source]: https://github.com/mgba-emu/mgba/
239
240Copyright
241---------
242
243mGBA 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.
244
245mGBA contains the following third-party libraries:
246
247- [inih](https://github.com/benhoyt/inih), which is copyright © 2009 – 2020 Ben Hoyt and used under a BSD 3-clause license.
248- [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.
249- [LZMA SDK](http://www.7-zip.org/sdk.html), which is public domain.
250- [MurmurHash3](https://github.com/aappleby/smhasher) implementation by Austin Appleby, which is public domain.
251- [getopt for MSVC](https://github.com/skandhurkat/Getopt-for-Visual-Studio/), which is public domain.
252- [SQLite3](https://www.sqlite.org), which is public domain.
253
254If 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.