README.md (view raw)
1mGBA
2====
3
4mGBA is a new 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.
5
6Up-to-date news and downloads can be found at [mgba.io](http://mgba.io/).
7
8[](https://travis-ci.org/mgba-emu/mgba)
9
10Features
11--------
12
13- Near full Game Boy Advance hardware support[<sup>[1]</sup>](#missing).
14- Fast emulation. Known to run at full speed even on low end hardware, such as netbooks.
15- Qt and SDL ports for a heavy-weight and a light-weight frontend.
16- Local (same computer) link cable support.
17- Save type detection, even for flash memory size[<sup>[2]</sup>](#flashdetect).
18- Support for cartridges with motion sensors and rumble (only usable with game controllers).
19- Real-time clock support, even without configuration.
20- A built-in BIOS implementation, and ability to load external BIOS files.
21- Turbo/fast-forward support by holding Tab.
22- Frameskip, configurable up to 10.
23- Screenshot support.
24- Cheat code support.
25- 9 savestate slots. Savestates are also viewable as screenshots.
26- Video and GIF recording.
27- Remappable controls for both keyboards and gamepads.
28- Loading from ZIP and 7z files.
29- IPS, UPS and BPS patch support.
30- Game debugging via a command-line interface (not available with Qt port) and GDB remote support, compatible with IDA Pro.
31- Configurable emulation rewinding.
32- Support for loading and exporting GameShark and Action Replay snapshots.
33
34### Planned features
35
36- Networked multiplayer link cable support ([Bug #1](http://mgba.io/b/1)).
37- Dolphin/JOY bus link cable support ([Bug #73](http://mgba.io/b/73)).
38- Re-recording support for tool-assist runs. ([Bugzilla keyword "TASBlocker"](https://endrift.com/mgba/bugs/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=TASBlocker))
39- Lua support for scripting ([Bug #62](http://mgba.io/b/62)).
40- A comprehensive debug suite ([Bug #132](http://mgba.io/b/132)).
41- e-Reader support. ([Bug #171](http://mgba.io/b/171))
42
43
44Supported Platforms
45-------------------
46
47- Windows Vista or newer
48- OS X 10.7 (Lion)[<sup>[3]</sup>](#osxver) or newer
49- Linux
50- FreeBSD
51
52Other Unix-like platforms, such as OpenBSD, are known to work as well, but are untested and not fully supported.
53
54### System requirements
55
56Requirements 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.
57
58Downloads
59---------
60
61Downloads can be found on the official website, in the [Downloads][downloads] section. The source code can be found on [GitHub][source].
62
63Controls
64--------
65
66Controls are configurable in the menu. The default gamepad controls are mapped so as to work with a DualShock 3. The default keyboard controls are as follows:
67
68- **A**: X
69- **B**: Z
70- **L**: A
71- **R**: S
72- **Start**: Enter
73- **Select**: Backspace
74
75Compiling
76---------
77
78Compiling requires using CMake 2.8.11 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. To use CMake to build on a Unix-based system, the recommended commands are as follows:
79
80 mkdir build
81 cd build
82 cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX:PATH=/usr ..
83 make
84 sudo make install
85
86This 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.
87
88#### Windows developer building
89
90To 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 ("MinGW-w64 Win32 Shell") and run this additional command (including the braces) to install the needed dependencies (please note that this involves downloading over 500MiB of packages, so it will take a long time):
91
92 pacman -Sy mingw-w64-i686-{cmake,ffmpeg,gcc,gdb,imagemagick,libzip,pkg-config,qt5,SDL2}
93
94Check out the source code by running this command:
95
96 git clone https://github.com/mgba-emu/mgba.git
97
98Then finally build it by running these commands:
99
100 cd mgba
101 mkdir build
102 cd build
103 cmake .. -G "MSYS Makefiles"
104 make
105
106Please 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.
107
108### Dependencies
109
110mGBA 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.
111
112- Qt 5: for the GUI frontend. Qt Multimedia or SDL are required for audio.
113- SDL: for a more basic frontend and gamepad support in the Qt frontend. SDL 2 is recommended, but 1.2 is supported.
114- zlib and libpng: for screenshot support and savestate-in-PNG support.
115- libedit: for command-line debugger support.
116- ffmpeg or libav: for video recording.
117- libzip: for loading ROMs stored in zip files.
118- ImageMagick: for GIF recording.
119
120Footnotes
121---------
122
123<a name="missing">[1]</a> Currently missing features are
124
125- OBJ window for modes 3, 4 and 5 ([Bug #5](http://mgba.io/b/5))
126- Mosaic for transformed OBJs ([Bug #9](http://mgba.io/b/9))
127
128<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.
129
130<a name="osxver">[3]</a> 10.7 is only needed for the Qt port. The SDL port is known to work on 10.6, and may work on older.
131
132[downloads]: http://mgba.io/downloads.html
133[source]: https://github.com/mgba-emu/mgba/
134
135Copyright
136---------
137
138mGBA is Copyright © 2013 – 2015 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.
139
140mGBA contains the following third-party libraries:
141
142- [inih](https://github.com/benhoyt/inih), which is copyright © 2009 Ben Hoyt and used under a BSD 3-clause license.
143- [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.
144- [LZMA SDK](http://www.7-zip.org/sdk.html), which is public domain.
145- [MurmurHash3](https://github.com/aappleby/smhasher) implementation by Austin Appleby, which is public domain.