Visual Boy Advance - M

Game Boy Advance Emulator

Homepage and Forum: http://vba-m.com

Building

The basic formula to build vba-m is:

cd ~ && mkdir src && cd src
git clone https://github.com/visualboyadvance-m/visualboyadvance-m.git
cd visualboyadvance-m
./installdeps

# ./installdeps will give you build instructions, which will be similar to:

mkdir build && cd build
cmake ..
make -j10

./installdeps is supported on MSys2, Linux (Debian/Ubuntu or Arch Linux) and Mac OS X (homebrew, macports or fink.)

If your OS is not supported, you will need the following:

• compiler and binutils
• make
• cmake
• git

And the following development libraries:

• zlib
• mesa (if using X11 or any OpenGL otherwise)
• ffmpeg (optional, for game recording)
• gettext and gettext tools
• jpeg
• png
• tiff
• SDL2
• SFML (optional, for link)
• OpenAL (optional, a sound interface)
• wxWidgets
• cairo (completely optional)

Support for more OSes/distributions for ./installdeps is planned.

Cross Compiling for Win32

./installdeps takes one optional parameter for cross-compiling target, which may be win32 which is an alias for mingw-w64-i686 to target 32 bit Windows, or mingw-gw64-x86_64 for 64 bit Windows targets.

The target is implicit on MSys2 depending on which MINGW shell you started (the value of $MSYSTEM.) It will not run in the MSys shell.

On Debian/Ubuntu this uses the MXE apt repository and works really well.

On Arch it currently doesn't work at all because the AUR stuff is completely broken, I will at some point redo the arch stuff to use MXE as well.

CMake Options

The CMake code tries to guess reasonable defaults for options, but you can override them on the cmake command with e.g.:

cmake .. -DENABLE_LINK=NO

Here is the complete list:

• ENABLE_SDL -- Build the SDL port (default OFF)
• ENABLE_WX -- Build the wxWidgets port (default ON)
• ENABLE_DEBUGGER -- Enable the debugger (default ON)
• ENABLE_NLS -- Enable translations (default ON)
• ENABLE_ASM_CORE -- Enable x86 ASM CPU cores (default ON for 32 bit builds)
• ENABLE_ASM_SCALERS -- Enable x86 ASM graphic filters (default ON for 32 bit builds)
• ENABLE_MMX -- Enable MMX (default ON for 32 bit builds)
• ENABLE_LINK -- Enable GBA linking functionality (default ON)
• ENABLE_LIRC -- Enable LIRC support (default OFF)
• ENABLE_FFMPEG -- Enable ffmpeg A/V recording (default ON on Linux and MSys2 and OFF elsewhere)
• ENABLE_LTO -- Compile with Link Time Optimization (gcc and clang only) (default ON where we know it seems to work)
• ENABLE_GBA_LOGGING -- Enable extended GBA logging (default ON)
• ENABLE_SDL -- Build the SDL port (default OFF)
• ENABLE_CAIRO -- Enable Cairo rendering for the wxWidgets port (default OFF)
• ENABLE_DIRECT3D -- Enable Direct3D rendering for the wxWidgets port (Windows only, default ON, NOT IMPLEMENTED!!!)
• ENABLE_XAUDIO2 -- Enable xaudio2 sound output for the wxWidgets port (Windows only, default ON)
• ENABLE_OPENAL -- Enable OpenAL for the wxWidgets port (default ON)

MSys2 Notes

To run the resulting binary, you can simply type:

./visualboyadvance-m

in the shell where you built it.

If you want to start the binary from e.g. a shortcut or Explorer, you will need to put c:\msys64\mingw32\bin for 32 bit builds and c:\msys64\mingw64\bin for 64 bit builds in your PATH (to edit system PATH, go to Control Panel -> Advanced -> Environment Variables.)

If you want to package the binary, you will need to include the MinGW DLLs it depends on, they can install to the same directory as the binary.

For our own builds, we use MXE to make static builds.

CONTRIBUTING

Please keep in mind that this app needs to run on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X at the very least, so code should be portable and/or use the appropriate #ifdefs and the like when needed.

Please try to craft a good commit message, this post by the great tpope explains how to do so: http://tbaggery.com/2008/04/19/a-note-about-git-commit-messages.html

If you have multiple small commits for a change, please try to use git rebase -i (interactive rebase) to squash them into one or a few logical commits (with good commit messages!) See: https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Tools-Rewriting-History if you are new to this.