New GBA Emulator : mgba, libretro core already planned

Libretro Cores
#1

After Meteor (whose development seems to have halted right after release a few years ago), it looks like we are finally about to see some novelty on the GBA emulation front.

Emu-France published a short news about mgba, a new emulator by author endrift. I tried the first public release (with the Qt GUI) and it is rather impressive for such an early build. Apparently, the result of a year and a half of development.

You can grab the source and compile it yourself from https://github.com/mgba-emu. There is also an official page: endrift.com/mgba As you will see, there is already a libretro core planned upstream. Exciting stuff!

Here is a shameless copy/paste of the current features:

mGBA 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.

Up-to-date news and downloads can be found at endrift.com/mgba.

Features

Near full Game Boy Advance hardware support[1]. Fast emulation. Known to run at full speed even on low end hardware, such as netbooks. Qt and SDL ports for a heavy-weight and a light-weight frontend. Save type detection, even for flash memory size[2]. Real-time clock support, even without configuration. A built-in BIOS implementation, and ability to load external BIOS files. Turbo/fast-forward support by holding Tab. Frameskip, configurable up to 9. Screenshot support. 9 savestate slots. Savestates are also viewable as screenshots. Video and GIF recording. Remappable controls for both keyboards and gamepads. Loading from ZIP files. IPS and UPS patch support. Game debugging via a command-line interface (not available with Qt port) and GDB remote support.

Planned features

Local and networked multiplayer link cable support (Bug #1). Dolphin/JOY bus link cable support (Bug #73). Cheat codes (Bug #58). Re-recording support for tool-assist runs. (Bugzilla keyword “TASBlocker”) Lua support for scripting (Bug #62). A comprehensive debug suite (Bug #132). libretro core for RetroArch and OpenEmu (Bug #86).

Supported Platforms

Windows Vista or newer OS X 10.7 (Lion)[3] or newer Linux FreeBSD Other Unix-like platforms work as well, but are untested.

#2

Yeah, I was happy to see that he’s planning a libretro port on his own. It sounds like he’s got some good plans for it, focusing on a compromise between speed and accuracy. I think he said it’s already something like 30% faster than VBA…?

#3

I tested it quickly to see if it had any of the issues I have in VBA-M that I reported here and none happen in mGBA =D. I imagine there might be other issues out there since it hasn’t been widely tested yet, but it’s an excellent first release.

#4

There’ve been some libretro commits on the mGBA GIT today.

#5

oh man, get hype! :smiley:

#6

Surely in its current state vba_next is still a better emulator than this?

#7

Not on my end for at least Android,I can’t get VBA Next to boot Mario&Luigi Superstar Saga when VBA-M boots just fine.

I saw the mGBA core info from an EmuCR compile update.