medusa 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.
- A built-in GBA BIOS implementation, and ability to load external BIOS files. DS currently requires BIOS and firmware dumps[<sup>[2]</sup>](#dscaveat).
Requirements 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.
Controls 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:
Compiling 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.
The 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.
To use a Docker image to build mGBA, simply run the following command while in the root of an mGBA checkout:
docker run --rm -t -v $PWD:/home/mgba/src mgba/windows:w32
This 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:
This 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.
If 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:
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 ("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):
Please 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.
If you have devkitARM (for 3DS), devkitPPC (for Wii), devkitA64 (for Switch), or vitasdk (for PS Vita), you can use the following commands for building:
medusa 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.
<aname="dscaveat">[2]</a> Many feature are still missing on the DS, including savestates, cheats, rumble, HLE BIOS, and more.
<aname="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.
If 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.
