• Visual Boy Advance - M
  • System Requirements
  • Building
  • Building a Libretro core
  • Visual Studio Support
  • Visual Studio Code Support
  • Dependencies
  • Cross compiling for 32 bit on a 64 bit host
  • Cross Compiling for Win32
  • CMake Options
  • MSys2 Notes
  • Debug Messages
  • Reporting Crash Bugs
  • Contributing

Our bridged Discord server is Here.

We are also on #vba-m on Libera IRC which has a Web Chat.

Want to know where you can install visualboyadvance-m in your linux distribution?

Visual Boy Advance - M

Game Boy and Game Boy Advance Emulator

The forums are here.

Windows and Mac builds are in the releases tab.

Nightly builds for Windows and macOS are at https://nightly.visualboyadvance-m.org/.

PLEASE TEST THE NIGHTLY OR MASTER WITH A FACTORY RESET BEFORE REPORTING ISSUES

Your distribution may have packages available as well, search for visualboyadvance-m or vbam.

It is also generally very easy to build from source, see below.

If you are using the windows binary release and you need localization, unzip the translations.zip to the same directory as the executable.

If you are having issues, try resetting the config file first, go to Help -> Factory Reset.

System Requirements

Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8.1 or 10/11, Linux distros or macOS.

2Ghz x86 (or x86-64) Intel Core 2 or AMD Athlon processor with SSE, Snapdragon 835 or newer CPU compatible with Arm for Windows.

• Just a guideline, lower clock speeds and Celeron processors may be able to run at full speed on lower settings, and Linux based ARM Operating systems have wider CPU support.

DirectX June 2010 Redist Full / Websetup for Xaudio (Remember to uncheck Bing on the websetup.)

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 # On Linux or macOS

mkdir build
cd build
cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -G Ninja
ninja

./installdeps is supported on MSYS2, Linux (Debian/Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, Solus, OpenSUSE, Gentoo and RHEL/CentOS) and Mac OS X (homebrew, MacPorts or Fink.)

Building a Libretro core

Clone this repo and then,

cd src/libretro
make -j`nproc`

Copy vbam_libretro.so to your RetroArch cores directory.

Visual Studio Support

For visual studio, dependency management is handled automatically with vcpkg, From the Visual Studio GUI, just clone the repository with git and build with the cmake configurations provided.

If the GUI does not detect cmake, go to File -> Open -> CMake and open the CMakeLists.txt.

If you are using 2017, make sure you have all the latest updates, some issues with cmake projects in the GUI have been fixed.

You can also build from the developer command prompt or powershell with the environment loaded.

Using your own user-wide installation of vcpkg is supported, just make sure the environment variable VCPKG_ROOT is set.

To build in the Visual Studio x64 Native Tools Command Prompt, use something like this:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -G Ninja
ninja

.

Visual Studio Code Support

Make sure the C/C++ and CMake Tools extensions are installed.

Add the following to your settings.json:

{
    "cmake.configureOnOpen": true,
    "cmake.preferredGenerators": [ "Ninja" ]
}

.

Dependencies

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

• C++ compiler and binutils
• make
• CMake
• git
• nasm (optional, for 32 bit builds)

And the following development libraries:

• zlib (required)
• mesa (if using X11 or any OpenGL otherwise)
• ffmpeg (optional, at least version 4.0.4, for game recording)
• gettext and gettext-tools
• SDL2 (required)
• SFML (optional, for link)
• openal-soft (required, a sound interface)
• wxWidgets (required for GUI, 2.8 and non-stl builds are no longer supported)

On Linux and similar, you also need the version of GTK your wxWidgets is linked to (usually 2 or 3) and the xorg development libraries.

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

Cross compiling for 32 bit on a 64 bit host

./installdeps m32 will set things up to build a 32 bit binary.

This is supported on Fedora, Arch, Solus and MSYS2.

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-w64-x86_64 for 64 bit Windows targets.

The target is implicit on MSYS2 depending on which MINGW shell you started (the value of $MSYSTEM.)

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

CMake Options

The CMake code tries to guess reasonable defaults for options, but you can override them, for example:

cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DENABLE_LINK=NO -G Ninja

. Here is the complete list:

CMake Option	What it Does	Defaults
ENABLE_SDL	Build the SDL port	OFF
ENABLE_WX	Build the wxWidgets port	ON
ENABLE_DEBUGGER	Enable the debugger	ON
ENABLE_ASM_CORE	Enable x86 ASM CPU cores (BUGGY AND DANGEROUS)	OFF
ENABLE_ASM	Enable the following two ASM options	ON for 32 bit builds
ENABLE_ASM_SCALERS	Enable x86 ASM graphic filters	ON for 32 bit builds
ENABLE_MMX	Enable MMX	ON for 32 bit builds
ENABLE_LINK	Enable GBA linking functionality (requires SFML)	AUTO
ENABLE_LIRC	Enable LIRC support	OFF
ENABLE_FFMPEG	Enable ffmpeg A/V recording	AUTO
ENABLE_ONLINEUPDATES	Enable online update checks	ON
ENABLE_LTO	Compile with Link Time Optimization (gcc and clang only)	ON for release build
ENABLE_GBA_LOGGING	Enable extended GBA logging	ON
ENABLE_XAUDIO2	Enable xaudio2 sound output for wxWidgets (Windows only)	ON
ENABLE_FAUDIO	Enable faudio sound output for wxWidgets,	ON, not 32 bit Win
ENABLE_ASAN	Enable libasan sanitizers (by default address, only in debug mode)	OFF
UPSTREAM_RELEASE	Do some release tasks, like codesigning, making zip and gpg sigs.	OFF
BUILD_TESTING	Build the tests and enable ctest support.	ON
VBAM_STATIC	Try link all libs statically (the following are set to ON if ON)	OFF
SDL2_STATIC	Try to link static SDL2 libraries	OFF
SFML_STATIC_LIBRARIES	Try to link static SFML libraries	OFF
FFMPEG_STATIC	Try to link static ffmpeg libraries	OFF
OPENAL_STATIC	Try to link static OpenAL libraries	OFF
TRANSLATIONS_ONLY	Build only the translations.zip and nothing else	OFF

Note for distro packagers, we use the CMake module GNUInstallDirs to configure installation directories.

On Unix to use a different version of wxWidgets, set wxWidgets_CONFIG_EXECUTABLE to the path to the wx-config script you want to use.

Reporting Crash Bugs

If the emulator crashes and you wish to report the bug, a backtrace made with debug symbols would be immensely helpful.

To generate one (on Linux and MSYS2) first build in debug mode by invoking cmake as:

cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug

After you've reproduced the crash, you need the core dump file, you may need to do something such as:

ulimit -c unlimited

, in your shell to enable core files.

This post explains how to retrieve core dump on some distributions, when they are managed by systemd.

Once you have the core file, open it with gdb, for example:

gdb -c core ./visualboyadvance-m

. In the gdb shell, to start the process and print the backtrace, type:

run
bt

. This may be a bit of a hassle, but it helps us out immensely.

Contributing

See the Developer Manual.