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
160##### MSYS2
161
162To 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):
163
164For x86 (32 bit) builds:
165
166 pacman -Sy --needed base-devel git mingw-w64-i686-{cmake,ffmpeg,gcc,gdb,libelf,libepoxy,libzip,pkg-config,qt5,SDL2,ntldd-git}
167
168For x86_64 (64 bit) builds:
169
170 pacman -Sy --needed base-devel git mingw-w64-x86_64-{cmake,ffmpeg,gcc,gdb,libelf,libepoxy,libzip,pkg-config,qt5,SDL2,ntldd-git}
171
172Check out the source code by running this command:
173
174 git clone https://github.com/mgba-emu/mgba.git
175
176Then finally build it by running these commands:
177
178 cd mgba
179 mkdir build
180 cd build
181 cmake .. -G "MSYS Makefiles"
182 make
183
184Please 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.
185
186##### Visual Studio
187
188To 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:
189
190 vcpkg install ffmpeg[vpx,x264] libepoxy libpng libzip sdl2 sqlite3
191
192Note 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.
193
194You 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:
195
196 vcpkg install qt5-base qt5-multimedia
197
198Next, 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.
199
200#### Toolchain building
201
202If you have devkitARM (for 3DS), devkitPPC (for Wii), devkitA64 (for Switch), or vitasdk (for PS Vita), you can use the following commands for building:
203
204 mkdir build
205 cd build
206 cmake -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=../src/platform/3ds/CMakeToolchain.txt ..
207 make
208
209Replace the `-DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE` parameter for the following platforms:
210
211- 3DS: `../src/platform/3ds/CMakeToolchain.txt`
212- Switch: `../src/platform/switch/CMakeToolchain.txt`
213- Vita: `../src/platform/psp2/CMakeToolchain.vitasdk`
214- Wii: `../src/platform/wii/CMakeToolchain.txt`
215
216### Dependencies
217
218mGBA 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.
219
220- Qt 5: for the GUI frontend. Qt Multimedia or SDL are required for audio.
221- SDL: for a more basic frontend and gamepad support in the Qt frontend. SDL 2 is recommended, but 1.2 is supported.
222- zlib and libpng: for screenshot support and savestate-in-PNG support.
223- libedit: for command-line debugger support.
224- ffmpeg or libav: for video recording.
225- libzip or zlib: for loading ROMs stored in zip files.
226- ImageMagick: for GIF recording.
227- SQLite3: for game databases.
228- libelf: for ELF loading.
229
230SQLite3, libpng, and zlib are included with the emulator, so they do not need to be externally compiled first.
231
232Footnotes
233---------
234
235<a name="missing">[1]</a> Currently missing features are
236
237- OBJ window for modes 3, 4 and 5 ([Bug #5](http://mgba.io/b/5))
238
239<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.
240
241<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.
242
243[downloads]: http://mgba.io/downloads.html
244[source]: https://github.com/mgba-emu/mgba/
245
246Copyright
247---------
248
249mGBA 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.
250
251mGBA contains the following third-party libraries:
252
253- [inih](https://github.com/benhoyt/inih), which is copyright © 2009 Ben Hoyt and used under a BSD 3-clause license.
254- [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.
255- [LZMA SDK](http://www.7-zip.org/sdk.html), which is public domain.
256- [MurmurHash3](https://github.com/aappleby/smhasher) implementation by Austin Appleby, which is public domain.
257- [getopt for MSVC](https://github.com/skandhurkat/Getopt-for-Visual-Studio/), which is public domain.
258- [SQLite3](https://www.sqlite.org), which is public domain.
259
260If 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.