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 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
55The following mappers are partially supported:
56
57- MBC6
58- MMM01
59- Pocket Cam
60- TAMA5
61- HuC-1
62- HuC-3
63
64### Planned features
65
66- Networked multiplayer link cable support.
67- Dolphin/JOY bus link cable support.
68- M4A audio mixing, for higher quality sound than hardware.
69- Re-recording support for tool-assist runs.
70- Lua support for scripting.
71- A comprehensive debug suite.
72- Wireless adapter support.
73
74Supported Platforms
75-------------------
76
77- Windows Vista or newer
78- OS X 10.7 (Lion)[<sup>[3]</sup>](#osxver) or newer
79- Linux
80- FreeBSD
81- Nintendo 3DS
82- Wii
83- PlayStation Vita
84
85Other Unix-like platforms, such as OpenBSD, are known to work as well, but are untested and not fully supported.
86
87### System requirements
88
89Requirements 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.
90
91Downloads
92---------
93
94Downloads can be found on the official website, in the [Downloads][downloads] section. The source code can be found on [GitHub][source].
95
96Controls
97--------
98
99Controls are configurable in the settings menu. Many game controllers should be automatically mapped by default. The default keyboard controls are as follows:
100
101- **A**: X
102- **B**: Z
103- **L**: A
104- **R**: S
105- **Start**: Enter
106- **Select**: Backspace
107
108Compiling
109---------
110
111Compiling 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.
112
113#### Docker building
114
115The 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.
116
117To use a Docker image to build mGBA, simply run the following command while in the root of an mGBA checkout:
118
119 docker run --rm -t -v $PWD:/home/mgba/src mgba/windows:w32
120
121This 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:
122
123- mgba/3ds
124- mgba/switch
125- mgba/ubuntu:xenial
126- mgba/ubuntu:bionic
127- mgba/ubuntu:cosmic
128- mgba/ubuntu:disco
129- mgba/ubuntu:eoan
130- mgba/ubuntu:focal
131- mgba/vita
132- mgba/wii
133- mgba/windows:w32
134- mgba/windows:w64
135
136#### *nix building
137
138To use CMake to build on a Unix-based system, the recommended commands are as follows:
139
140 mkdir build
141 cd build
142 cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX:PATH=/usr ..
143 make
144 sudo make install
145
146This 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.
147
148If 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:
149
150 brew install cmake ffmpeg libzip qt5 sdl2 libedit pkg-config
151 mkdir build
152 cd build
153 cmake -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=`brew --prefix qt5` ..
154 make
155
156Note that you should not do a `make install` on macOS, as it will not work properly.
157
158#### Windows developer building
159
160To 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):
161
162For x86 (32 bit) builds:
163
164 pacman -Sy --needed base-devel git mingw-w64-i686-{cmake,ffmpeg,gcc,gdb,libelf,libepoxy,libzip,pkg-config,qt5,SDL2,ntldd-git}
165
166For x86_64 (64 bit) builds:
167
168 pacman -Sy --needed base-devel git mingw-w64-x86_64-{cmake,ffmpeg,gcc,gdb,libelf,libepoxy,libzip,pkg-config,qt5,SDL2,ntldd-git}
169
170Check out the source code by running this command:
171
172 git clone https://github.com/mgba-emu/mgba.git
173
174Then finally build it by running these commands:
175
176 cd mgba
177 mkdir build
178 cd build
179 cmake .. -G "MSYS Makefiles"
180 make
181
182Please 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.
183
184#### Toolchain building
185
186If you have devkitARM (for 3DS), devkitPPC (for Wii), devkitA64 (for Switch), or vitasdk (for PS Vita), you can use the following commands for building:
187
188 mkdir build
189 cd build
190 cmake -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=../src/platform/3ds/CMakeToolchain.txt ..
191 make
192
193Replace the `-DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE` parameter for the following platforms:
194
195- 3DS: `../src/platform/3ds/CMakeToolchain.txt`
196- Switch: `../src/platform/switch/CMakeToolchain.txt`
197- Vita: `../src/platform/psp2/CMakeToolchain.vitasdk`
198- Wii: `../src/platform/wii/CMakeToolchain.txt`
199
200### Dependencies
201
202mGBA 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.
203
204- Qt 5: for the GUI frontend. Qt Multimedia or SDL are required for audio.
205- SDL: for a more basic frontend and gamepad support in the Qt frontend. SDL 2 is recommended, but 1.2 is supported.
206- zlib and libpng: for screenshot support and savestate-in-PNG support.
207- libedit: for command-line debugger support.
208- ffmpeg or libav: for video recording.
209- libzip or zlib: for loading ROMs stored in zip files.
210- ImageMagick: for GIF recording.
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> 10.7 is only needed for the Qt port. 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.