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- Near full 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- A built-in GBA BIOS implementation, and ability to load external BIOS files. DS currently requires BIOS and firmware dumps[<sup>[2]</sup>](#dscaveat).
23- Turbo/fast-forward support by holding Tab.
24- Rewind by holding Backquote.
25- Frameskip, configurable up to 10.
26- Screenshot support.
27- Cheat code support[<sup>[2]</sup>](#dscaveat).
28- 9 savestate slots. Savestates are also viewable as screenshots[<sup>[2]</sup>](#dscaveat).
29- Video and GIF recording.
30- Remappable controls for both keyboards and gamepads.
31- Loading from ZIP and 7z files.
32- IPS, UPS and BPS patch support.
33- Game debugging via a command-line interface (not available with Qt port) and GDB remote support, compatible with IDA Pro.
34- Configurable emulation rewinding.
35- Support for loading and exporting GameShark and Action Replay snapshots.
36- Cores available for RetroArch/Libretro and OpenEmu.
37- Many, many smaller things.
38
39### Planned features
40
41- Networked multiplayer link cable support.
42- Dolphin/JOY bus link cable support.
43- M4A audio mixing, for higher quality sound than hardware.
44- Re-recording support for tool-assist runs.
45- Lua support for scripting.
46- A comprehensive debug suite.
47- e-Reader support.
48- Wireless adapter support.
49- Game Boy Printer support.
50- OpenGL renderer.
51- HLE support for DS BIOS and DS ARM7 processor.
52- Synthesizing a customizable DS firmware to avoid needing a dump.
53
54Supported Platforms
55-------------------
56
57- Windows Vista or newer
58- OS X 10.7 (Lion)[<sup>[4]</sup>](#osxver) or newer
59- Linux
60- FreeBSD
61
62The following platforms are supported for everything except DS:
63
64- Nintendo 3DS
65- Wii
66- PlayStation Vita
67
68Other Unix-like platforms, such as OpenBSD, are known to work as well, but are untested and not fully supported.
69
70### System requirements
71
72Requirements 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.
73
74Downloads
75---------
76
77Downloads can be found on the official website, in the [Downloads][downloads] section. The source code can be found on [GitHub][source].
78
79Controls
80--------
81
82Controls 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:
83
84- **A**: X
85- **B**: Z
86- **L**: A
87- **R**: S
88- **Start**: Enter
89- **Select**: Backspace
90
91DS default controls are slightly different:
92
93- **A**: X
94- **B**: Z
95- **X**: S
96- **Y**: A
97- **L**: Q
98- **R**: W
99- **Start**: Enter
100- **Select**: Backspace
101
102Compiling
103---------
104
105Compiling 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:
106
107 mkdir build
108 cd build
109 cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX:PATH=/usr ..
110 make
111 sudo make install
112
113This 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.
114
115#### Windows developer building
116
117To 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 500MiB of packages, so it will take a long time):
118
119For x86 (32 bit) builds:
120
121 pacman -Sy mingw-w64-i686-{cmake,ffmpeg,gcc,gdb,imagemagick,libzip,pkg-config,qt5,SDL2}
122
123For x86_64 (64 bit) builds:
124
125 pacman -Sy mingw-w64-x86_64-{cmake,ffmpeg,gcc,gdb,imagemagick,libzip,pkg-config,qt5,SDL2}
126
127Check out the source code by running this command:
128
129 git clone https://github.com/mgba-emu/mgba.git -b medusa medusa
130
131Then finally build it by running these commands:
132
133 cd medusa
134 mkdir build
135 cd build
136 cmake .. -G "MSYS Makefiles"
137 make
138
139Please 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), a tool called "[Dependency Walker](http://dependencywalker.com)" can be used to see which additional DLL files need to be shipped with the medusa executable.
140
141### Dependencies
142
143medusa 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.
144
145- Qt 5: for the GUI frontend. Qt Multimedia or SDL are required for audio.
146- SDL: for a more basic frontend and gamepad support in the Qt frontend. SDL 2 is recommended, but 1.2 is supported.
147- zlib and libpng: for screenshot support and savestate-in-PNG support.
148- libedit: for command-line debugger support.
149- ffmpeg or libav: for video recording.
150- libzip or zlib: for loading ROMs stored in zip files.
151- ImageMagick: for GIF recording.
152- SQLite3: for game databases.
153
154Both libpng and zlib are included with the emulator, so they do not need to be externally compiled first.
155
156Footnotes
157---------
158
159<a name="missing">[1]</a> Currently missing features on GBA are
160
161- OBJ window for modes 3, 4 and 5 ([Bug #5](http://mgba.io/b/5))
162- Mosaic for transformed OBJs ([Bug #9](http://mgba.io/b/9))
163
164Missing features on DS are
165
166- Audio:
167 - Master audio settings
168 - Sound output capture
169 - Microphone
170- Graphics:
171 - Edge marking/wireframe
172 - Toon shading
173 - Highlight shading
174 - Fog
175 - Clear depth
176 - Anti-aliasing
177 - Alpha test
178 - Position test
179 - Vector test
180 - Bitmap rear plane
181 - Large bitmap mode 6
182 - 1-dot depth clipping
183 - Vector matrix memory mapping
184 - Polygon/vertex RAM entry count memory mapping
185 - Rendered line count memory mapping
186 - Horizontal scrolling on 3D background
187 - Some bitmap OBJ mappings
188 - DMA FIFO backgrounds
189- Other:
190 - Cache emulation/estimation
191 - Slot-2 access/RAM/rumble
192 - BIOS protection
193 - Display start DMAs
194 - Most of Wi-Fi
195 - RTC interrupts
196 - Manual IPC sync IRQs
197 - Lid switch
198 - Power management
199 - Touchscreen temperature/pressure support
200 - Various MMIO registers
201 - DSi cart protections
202
203<a name="dscaveat">[2]</a> Many feature are still missing on the DS, including savestates, cheats, rumble, HLE BIOS, and more.
204
205<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.
206
207<a name="osxver">[4]</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.
208
209[downloads]: http://mgba.io/downloads.html
210[source]: https://github.com/mgba-emu/mgba/
211
212Copyright
213---------
214
215medusa is Copyright © 2013 – 2017 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.
216
217medusa contains the following third-party libraries:
218
219- [inih](https://github.com/benhoyt/inih), which is copyright © 2009 Ben Hoyt and used under a BSD 3-clause license.
220- [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.
221- [LZMA SDK](http://www.7-zip.org/sdk.html), which is public domain.
222- [MurmurHash3](https://github.com/aappleby/smhasher) implementation by Austin Appleby, which is public domain.
223- [getopt for MSVC](https://github.com/skandhurkat/Getopt-for-Visual-Studio/), which is public domain.
224- [SQLite3](https://www.sqlite.org), which is public domain.
225
226If 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.