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://buildbot.mgba.io)
9[](https://hosted.weblate.org/engage/mgba)
10
11Features
12--------
13
14- Highly accurate Game Boy Advance hardware support[<sup>[1]</sup>](#missing).
15- Game Boy/Game Boy Color hardware support.
16- Fast emulation. Known to run at full speed even on low end hardware, such as netbooks.
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>[2]</sup>](#flashdetect).
20- Support for cartridges with motion sensors and rumble (only usable with game controllers).
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 BIOS implementation, and ability to load external BIOS files.
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.
30- 9 savestate slots. Savestates are also viewable as screenshots.
31- Video, GIF, WebP, and APNG recording.
32- e-Reader support.
33- Remappable controls for both keyboards and gamepads.
34- Loading from ZIP and 7z files.
35- IPS, UPS and BPS patch support.
36- Game debugging via a command-line interface and GDB remote support, compatible with IDA Pro.
37- Configurable emulation rewinding.
38- Support for loading and exporting GameShark and Action Replay snapshots.
39- Cores available for RetroArch/Libretro and OpenEmu.
40- Community-provided translations for several languages via [Weblate](https://hosted.weblate.org/engage/mgba).
41- Many, many smaller things.
42
43#### Game Boy mappers
44
45The following mappers are fully supported:
46
47- MBC1
48- MBC1M
49- MBC2
50- MBC3
51- MBC3+RTC
52- MBC5
53- MBC5+Rumble
54- MBC7
55- Wisdom Tree (unlicensed)
56- Pokémon Jade/Diamond (unlicensed)
57- BBD (unlicensed MBC5-like)
58- Hitek (unlicensed MBC5-like)
59
60The following mappers are partially supported:
61
62- MBC6 (missing flash memory write support)
63- MMM01
64- Pocket Cam
65- TAMA5 (missing RTC support)
66- HuC-1 (missing IR support)
67- HuC-3 (missing RTC and IR support)
68
69### Planned features
70
71- Networked multiplayer link cable support.
72- Dolphin/JOY bus link cable support.
73- MP2k audio mixing, for higher quality sound than hardware.
74- Re-recording support for tool-assist runs.
75- Lua support for scripting.
76- A comprehensive debug suite.
77- Wireless adapter support.
78
79Supported Platforms
80-------------------
81
82- Windows Vista or newer
83- OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion)[<sup>[3]</sup>](#osxver) or newer
84- Linux
85- FreeBSD
86- Nintendo 3DS
87- Nintendo Switch
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. 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.
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:
106
107- **A**: X
108- **B**: Z
109- **L**: A
110- **R**: S
111- **Start**: Enter
112- **Select**: Backspace
113
114Compiling
115---------
116
117Compiling 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.
118
119#### Docker building
120
121The 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.
122
123To use a Docker image to build mGBA, simply run the following command while in the root of an mGBA checkout:
124
125 docker run --rm -t -v $PWD:/home/mgba/src mgba/windows:w32
126
127This 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:
128
129- mgba/3ds
130- mgba/switch
131- mgba/ubuntu:xenial
132- mgba/ubuntu:bionic
133- mgba/ubuntu:focal
134- mgba/ubuntu:groovy
135- mgba/vita
136- mgba/wii
137- mgba/windows:w32
138- mgba/windows:w64
139
140#### *nix building
141
142To use CMake to build on a Unix-based system, the recommended commands are as follows:
143
144 mkdir build
145 cd build
146 cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX:PATH=/usr ..
147 make
148 sudo make install
149
150This 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.
151
152If 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:
153
154 brew install cmake ffmpeg libzip qt5 sdl2 libedit pkg-config
155 mkdir build
156 cd build
157 cmake -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=`brew --prefix qt5` ..
158 make
159
160Note that you should not do a `make install` on macOS, as it will not work properly.
161
162#### Windows developer building
163
164##### MSYS2
165
166To 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):
167
168 pacman -Sy --needed base-devel git ${MINGW_PACKAGE_PREFIX}-{cmake,ffmpeg,gcc,gdb,libelf,libepoxy,libzip,pkgconf,qt5,SDL2,ntldd-git}
169
170Check out the source code by running this command:
171
172 git clone https://github.com/mgba-emu/mgba.git
173
174Then finally build it by running these commands:
175
176 mkdir -p mgba/build
177 cd mgba/build
178 cmake .. -G "MSYS Makefiles"
179 make -j$(nproc --ignore=1)
180
181Please 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.
182
183##### Visual Studio
184
185To 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:
186
187 vcpkg install ffmpeg[vpx,x264] libepoxy libpng libzip sdl2 sqlite3
188
189Note 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.
190
191You 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:
192
193 vcpkg install qt5-base qt5-multimedia
194
195Next, 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.
196
197#### Toolchain building
198
199If you have devkitARM (for 3DS), devkitPPC (for Wii), devkitA64 (for Switch), or vitasdk (for PS Vita), you can use the following commands for building:
200
201 mkdir build
202 cd build
203 cmake -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=../src/platform/3ds/CMakeToolchain.txt ..
204 make
205
206Replace the `-DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE` parameter for the following platforms:
207
208- 3DS: `../src/platform/3ds/CMakeToolchain.txt`
209- Switch: `../src/platform/switch/CMakeToolchain.txt`
210- Vita: `../src/platform/psp2/CMakeToolchain.vitasdk`
211- Wii: `../src/platform/wii/CMakeToolchain.txt`
212
213### Dependencies
214
215mGBA 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.
216
217- Qt 5: for the GUI frontend. Qt Multimedia or SDL are required for audio.
218- SDL: for a more basic frontend and gamepad support in the Qt frontend. SDL 2 is recommended, but 1.2 is supported.
219- zlib and libpng: for screenshot support and savestate-in-PNG support.
220- libedit: for command-line debugger support.
221- ffmpeg or libav: for video, GIF, WebP, and APNG recording.
222- libzip or zlib: for loading ROMs stored in zip files.
223- SQLite3: for game databases.
224- libelf: for ELF loading.
225
226SQLite3, libpng, and zlib are included with the emulator, so they do not need to be externally compiled first.
227
228Footnotes
229---------
230
231<a name="missing">[1]</a> Currently missing features are
232
233- OBJ window for modes 3, 4 and 5 ([Bug #5](http://mgba.io/b/5))
234
235<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.
236
237<a name="osxver">[3]</a> 10.8 is only needed for the Qt port. It may be possible to build or running the Qt port on 10.7 or older, but this is not officially supported. The SDL port is known to work on 10.5, and may work on older.
238
239[downloads]: http://mgba.io/downloads.html
240[source]: https://github.com/mgba-emu/mgba/
241
242Copyright
243---------
244
245mGBA is Copyright © 2013 – 2021 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.
246
247mGBA contains the following third-party libraries:
248
249- [inih](https://github.com/benhoyt/inih), which is copyright © 2009 – 2020 Ben Hoyt and used under a BSD 3-clause license.
250- [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.
251- [LZMA SDK](http://www.7-zip.org/sdk.html), which is public domain.
252- [MurmurHash3](https://github.com/aappleby/smhasher) implementation by Austin Appleby, which is public domain.
253- [getopt for MSVC](https://github.com/skandhurkat/Getopt-for-Visual-Studio/), which is public domain.
254- [SQLite3](https://www.sqlite.org), which is public domain.
255
256If 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.