mGBA 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.
Requirements 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.
Controls 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:
Compiling 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:
This 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.
To 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):
Check out the source code by running this command:
git clone https://github.com/mgba-emu/mgba.git
Then finally build it by running these commands:
cd mgba
mkdir build
cd build
cmake .. -G "MSYS Makefiles"
make
Please 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.
mGBA 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.
- Qt 5: for the GUI frontend. Qt Multimedia or SDL are required for audio.
- SDL: for a more basic frontend and gamepad support in the Qt frontend. SDL 2 is recommended, but 1.2 is supported.
- zlib and libpng: for screenshot support and savestate-in-PNG support.
<aname="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.
If 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.
