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- MBC6
57- MMM01
58- Pocket Cam
59- TAMA5
60- HuC-1
61- HuC-3
62
63### Planned features
64
65- Networked multiplayer link cable support.
66- Dolphin/JOY bus link cable support.
67- M4A audio mixing, for higher quality sound than hardware.
68- Re-recording support for tool-assist runs.
69- Lua support for scripting.
70- A comprehensive debug suite.
71- e-Reader support.
72- Wireless adapter support.
73- OpenGL renderer.
74- HLE support for DS BIOS and DS ARM7 processor.
75- Synthesizing a customizable DS firmware to avoid needing a dump.
76
77Supported Platforms
78-------------------
79
80- Windows Vista or newer
81- OS X 10.7 (Lion)[<sup>[4]</sup>](#osxver) or newer
82- Linux
83- FreeBSD
84
85The following platforms are supported for everything except DS:
86
87- Nintendo 3DS
88- Wii
89- PlayStation Vita
90
91Other Unix-like platforms, such as OpenBSD, are known to work as well, but are untested and not fully supported.
92
93### System requirements
94
95Requirements 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, with OpenGL 3.0 or newer for shaders and advanced features.
96
97Downloads
98---------
99
100Downloads can be found on the official website, in the [Downloads][downloads] section. The source code can be found on [GitHub][source].
101
102Controls
103--------
104
105Controls 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:
106
107- **A**: X
108- **B**: Z
109- **L**: A
110- **R**: S
111- **Start**: Enter
112- **Select**: Backspace
113
114DS default controls are slightly different:
115
116- **A**: X
117- **B**: Z
118- **X**: S
119- **Y**: A
120- **L**: Q
121- **R**: W
122- **Start**: Enter
123- **Select**: Backspace
124
125Compiling
126---------
127
128Compiling requires using CMake 3.1 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.
129
130#### Docker building
131
132The 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.
133
134To use a Docker image to build mGBA, simply run the following command while in the root of an mGBA checkout:
135
136 docker run --rm -t -v $PWD:/home/mgba/src mgba/windows:w32
137
138This 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:
139
140- mgba/3ds
141- mgba/switch
142- mgba/ubuntu:xenial
143- mgba/ubuntu:bionic
144- mgba/ubuntu:cosmic
145- mgba/vita
146- mgba/wii
147- mgba/windows:w32
148- mgba/windows:w64
149
150#### *nix building
151
152To use CMake to build on a Unix-based system, the recommended commands are as follows:
153
154 mkdir build
155 cd build
156 cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX:PATH=/usr ..
157 make
158 sudo make install
159
160This 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.
161
162If 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:
163
164 brew install cmake ffmpeg imagemagick libzip qt5 sdl2 libedit pkg-config
165 mkdir build
166 cd build
167 cmake -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=`brew --prefix qt5` ..
168 make
169
170Note that you should not do a `make install` on macOS, as it will not work properly.
171
172#### Windows developer building
173
174To 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):
175
176For x86 (32 bit) builds:
177
178 pacman -Sy --needed base-devel git mingw-w64-i686-{cmake,ffmpeg,gcc,gdb,imagemagick,libelf,libepoxy,libzip,pkg-config,qt5,SDL2,ntldd-git}
179
180For x86_64 (64 bit) builds:
181
182 pacman -Sy --needed base-devel git mingw-w64-x86_64-{cmake,ffmpeg,gcc,gdb,imagemagick,libelf,libepoxy,libzip,pkg-config,qt5,SDL2,ntldd-git}
183
184Check out the source code by running this command:
185
186 git clone https://github.com/mgba-emu/mgba.git -b medusa medusa
187
188Then finally build it by running these commands:
189
190 cd medusa
191 mkdir build
192 cd build
193 cmake .. -G "MSYS Makefiles"
194 make
195
196Please 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.
197
198#### Toolchain building
199
200If you have devkitARM (for 3DS), devkitPPC (for Wii), devkitA64 (for Switch), or vitasdk (for PS Vita), you can use the following commands for building:
201
202 mkdir build
203 cd build
204 cmake -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=../src/platform/3ds/CMakeToolchain.txt ..
205 make
206
207Replace the `-DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE` parameter for the following platforms:
208
209- 3DS: `../src/platform/3ds/CMakeToolchain.txt`
210- Switch: `../src/platform/switch/CMakeToolchain.txt`
211- Vita: `../src/platform/psp2/CMakeToolchain.vitasdk`
212- Wii: `../src/platform/wii/CMakeToolchain.txt`
213
214### Dependencies
215
216medusa 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.
217
218- Qt 5: for the GUI frontend. Qt Multimedia or SDL are required for audio.
219- SDL: for a more basic frontend and gamepad support in the Qt frontend. SDL 2 is recommended, but 1.2 is supported.
220- zlib and libpng: for screenshot support and savestate-in-PNG support.
221- libedit: for command-line debugger support.
222- ffmpeg or libav: for video recording.
223- libzip or zlib: for loading ROMs stored in zip files.
224- ImageMagick: for GIF recording.
225- SQLite3: for game databases.
226- libelf: for ELF loading.
227
228SQLite3, libpng, and zlib are included with the emulator, so they do not need to be externally compiled first.
229
230Footnotes
231---------
232
233<a name="missing">[1]</a> Currently missing features on GBA are
234
235- OBJ window for modes 3, 4 and 5 ([Bug #5](http://mgba.io/b/5))
236
237Missing features on DS are
238
239- Audio:
240 - Master audio settings
241 - Sound output capture
242 - Microphone
243- Graphics:
244 - Edge marking/wireframe
245 - Highlight shading
246 - Fog
247 - Anti-aliasing
248 - Alpha test
249 - Position test
250 - Vector test
251 - Bitmap rear plane
252 - Large bitmap mode 6
253 - 1-dot depth clipping
254 - Vector matrix memory mapping
255 - Polygon/vertex RAM entry count memory mapping
256 - Rendered line count memory mapping
257 - Horizontal scrolling on 3D background
258 - Some bitmap OBJ mappings
259 - DMA FIFO backgrounds
260- Other:
261 - Cache emulation/estimation
262 - Slot-2 access/RAM/rumble
263 - BIOS protection
264 - Display start DMAs
265 - Most of Wi-Fi
266 - RTC interrupts
267 - Manual IPC sync IRQs
268 - Lid switch
269 - Power management
270 - Touchscreen temperature/pressure support
271 - Various MMIO registers
272 - DSi cart protections
273
274<a name="dscaveat">[2]</a> Many feature are still missing on the DS, including savestates, cheats, rumble, HLE BIOS, and more.
275
276<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.
277
278<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.
279
280[downloads]: http://mgba.io/downloads.html
281[source]: https://github.com/mgba-emu/mgba/
282
283Copyright
284---------
285
286medusa 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.
287
288medusa contains the following third-party libraries:
289
290- [inih](https://github.com/benhoyt/inih), which is copyright © 2009 Ben Hoyt and used under a BSD 3-clause license.
291- [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.
292- [LZMA SDK](http://www.7-zip.org/sdk.html), which is public domain.
293- [MurmurHash3](https://github.com/aappleby/smhasher) implementation by Austin Appleby, which is public domain.
294- [getopt for MSVC](https://github.com/skandhurkat/Getopt-for-Visual-Studio/), which is public domain.
295- [SQLite3](https://www.sqlite.org), which is public domain.
296
297If 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.