README.md (view raw)
1medusa
2======
3
4medusa is an emulator for running Nintendo DS, Game Boy Advance and Game Boy games. It aims to be faster and more accurate than many existing Nintendo DS and 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- Partial DS hardware support[<sup>[1]</sup>](#missing).
15- Game Boy/Game Boy Color hardware support.
16- Fast emulation for Game Boy and Game Boy Advance. Known to run at full speed even on low end hardware, such as netbooks[<sup>[2]</sup>](#dscaveat).
17- Qt and SDL ports for a heavy-weight and a light-weight frontend.
18- Local (same computer) link cable support.
19- Save type detection, even for flash memory size[<sup>[3]</sup>](#flashdetect).
20- Support for cartridges with motion sensors and rumble (only usable with game controllers)[<sup>[2]</sup>](#dscaveat).
21- Real-time clock support, even without configuration.
22- Solar sensor support for Boktai games.
23- Game Boy Camera and Game Boy Printer support.
24- A built-in GBA BIOS implementation, and ability to load external BIOS files. DS currently requires BIOS and firmware dumps[<sup>[2]</sup>](#dscaveat).
25- Turbo/fast-forward support by holding Tab.
26- Rewind by holding Backquote.
27- Frameskip, configurable up to 10.
28- Screenshot support.
29- Cheat code support[<sup>[2]</sup>](#dscaveat).
30- 9 savestate slots. Savestates are also viewable as screenshots[<sup>[2]</sup>](#dscaveat).
31- Video and GIF recording.
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
54The following mappers are partially supported:
55
56- Pocket Cam
57- TAMA5
58- HuC-3
59
60The following mappers are not currently supported:
61
62- MBC6
63- HuC-1
64- MMM01
65
66### Planned features
67
68- Networked multiplayer link cable support.
69- Dolphin/JOY bus link cable support.
70- M4A audio mixing, for higher quality sound than hardware.
71- Re-recording support for tool-assist runs.
72- Lua support for scripting.
73- A comprehensive debug suite.
74- e-Reader support.
75- Wireless adapter support.
76- OpenGL renderer.
77- HLE support for DS BIOS and DS ARM7 processor.
78- Synthesizing a customizable DS firmware to avoid needing a dump.
79
80Supported Platforms
81-------------------
82
83- Windows Vista or newer
84- OS X 10.7 (Lion)[<sup>[4]</sup>](#osxver) or newer
85- Linux
86- FreeBSD
87
88The following platforms are supported for everything except DS:
89
90- Nintendo 3DS
91- Wii
92- PlayStation Vita
93
94Other Unix-like platforms, such as OpenBSD, are known to work as well, but are untested and not fully supported.
95
96### System requirements
97
98Requirements are minimal[<sup>[2]</sup>](#dscaveat). 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.
99
100Downloads
101---------
102
103Downloads can be found on the official website, in the [Downloads][downloads] section. The source code can be found on [GitHub][source].
104
105Controls
106--------
107
108Controls are configurable in the settings menu. Many game controllers should be automatically mapped by default. The default keyboard controls are as follows for GB and GBA:
109
110- **A**: X
111- **B**: Z
112- **L**: A
113- **R**: S
114- **Start**: Enter
115- **Select**: Backspace
116
117DS default controls are slightly different:
118
119- **A**: X
120- **B**: Z
121- **X**: S
122- **Y**: A
123- **L**: Q
124- **R**: W
125- **Start**: Enter
126- **Select**: Backspace
127
128Compiling
129---------
130
131Compiling requires using CMake 2.8.11 or newer. GCC and Clang are both known to work to compile medusa, but Visual Studio 2013 and older are known not to work. Support for Visual Studio 2015 and newer is coming soon. To use CMake to build on a Unix-based system, the recommended commands are as follows:
132
133 mkdir build
134 cd build
135 cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX:PATH=/usr ..
136 make
137 sudo make install
138
139This will build and install medusa 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.
140
141If 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:
142
143 brew install cmake ffmpeg imagemagick libzip qt5 sdl2 libedit
144 mkdir build
145 cd build
146 cmake -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=`brew --prefix qt5` ..
147 make
148
149Note that you should not do a `make install` on macOS, as it will not work properly.
150
151#### Windows developer building
152
153To 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):
154
155For x86 (32 bit) builds:
156
157 pacman -Sy base-devel git mingw-w64-i686-{cmake,ffmpeg,gcc,gdb,imagemagick,libelf,libepoxy,libzip,pkg-config,qt5,SDL2,ntldd-git}
158
159For x86_64 (64 bit) builds:
160
161 pacman -Sy base-devel git mingw-w64-x86_64-{cmake,ffmpeg,gcc,gdb,imagemagick,libelf,libepoxy,libzip,pkg-config,qt5,SDL2,ntldd-git}
162
163Check out the source code by running this command:
164
165 git clone https://github.com/mgba-emu/mgba.git -b medusa medusa
166
167Then finally build it by running these commands:
168
169 cd medusa
170 mkdir build
171 cd build
172 cmake .. -G "MSYS Makefiles"
173 make
174
175Please note that this build of medusa 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.
176
177### Dependencies
178
179medusa 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.
180
181- Qt 5: for the GUI frontend. Qt Multimedia or SDL are required for audio.
182- SDL: for a more basic frontend and gamepad support in the Qt frontend. SDL 2 is recommended, but 1.2 is supported.
183- zlib and libpng: for screenshot support and savestate-in-PNG support.
184- libedit: for command-line debugger support.
185- ffmpeg or libav: for video recording.
186- libzip or zlib: for loading ROMs stored in zip files.
187- ImageMagick: for GIF recording.
188- SQLite3: for game databases.
189- libelf: for ELF loading.
190
191SQLite3, libpng, and zlib are included with the emulator, so they do not need to be externally compiled first.
192
193Footnotes
194---------
195
196<a name="missing">[1]</a> Currently missing features on GBA are
197
198- OBJ window for modes 3, 4 and 5 ([Bug #5](http://mgba.io/b/5))
199- Mosaic for transformed OBJs ([Bug #9](http://mgba.io/b/9))
200
201Missing features on DS are
202
203- Audio:
204 - Master audio settings
205 - Sound output capture
206 - Microphone
207- Graphics:
208 - Edge marking/wireframe
209 - Highlight shading
210 - Fog
211 - Anti-aliasing
212 - Alpha test
213 - Position test
214 - Vector test
215 - Bitmap rear plane
216 - Large bitmap mode 6
217 - 1-dot depth clipping
218 - Vector matrix memory mapping
219 - Polygon/vertex RAM entry count memory mapping
220 - Rendered line count memory mapping
221 - Horizontal scrolling on 3D background
222 - Some bitmap OBJ mappings
223 - DMA FIFO backgrounds
224- Other:
225 - Cache emulation/estimation
226 - Slot-2 access/RAM/rumble
227 - BIOS protection
228 - Display start DMAs
229 - Most of Wi-Fi
230 - RTC interrupts
231 - Manual IPC sync IRQs
232 - Lid switch
233 - Power management
234 - Touchscreen temperature/pressure support
235 - Various MMIO registers
236 - DSi cart protections
237
238<a name="dscaveat">[2]</a> Many feature are still missing on the DS, including savestates, cheats, rumble, HLE BIOS, and more.
239
240<a name="flashdetect">[3]</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.
241
242<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.
243
244[downloads]: http://mgba.io/downloads.html
245[source]: https://github.com/mgba-emu/mgba/
246
247Copyright
248---------
249
250medusa 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.
251
252medusa contains the following third-party libraries:
253
254- [inih](https://github.com/benhoyt/inih), which is copyright © 2009 Ben Hoyt and used under a BSD 3-clause license.
255- [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.
256- [LZMA SDK](http://www.7-zip.org/sdk.html), which is public domain.
257- [MurmurHash3](https://github.com/aappleby/smhasher) implementation by Austin Appleby, which is public domain.
258- [getopt for MSVC](https://github.com/skandhurkat/Getopt-for-Visual-Studio/), which is public domain.
259- [SQLite3](https://www.sqlite.org), which is public domain.
260
261If you are a game publisher and wish to license medusa for commercial usage, please email [licensing@mgba.io](mailto:licensing@mgba.io) for more information.