mGBA

Original readme:

Link to the project website  [https://github.com/mgba-emu/mgba]

mGBA for AOS4
=============

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. It also supports Game Boy and Game Boy Color
games.

Up-to-date news and downloads can be found at [mgba.io](https://mgba.io/).

[![Build
status](https://buildbot.mgba.io/badges/build-win32.svg)](https://buildbot.mgba.
io)
[![Translation
status](https://hosted.weblate.org/widgets/mgba/-/svg-badge.svg)](https://hosted
.weblate.org/engage/mgba)

Features
--------

- Highly accurate Game Boy Advance hardware support[<sup>[1]</sup>](#missing).
- Game Boy/Game Boy Color hardware support.
- 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.
- Local (same computer) link cable support.
- Save type detection, even for flash memory size[<sup>[2]</sup>](#flashdetect).
- Support for cartridges with motion sensors and rumble (only usable with game
controllers).
- Real-time clock support, even without configuration.
- Solar sensor support for Boktai games.
- Game Boy Camera and Game Boy Printer support.
- A built-in BIOS implementation, and ability to load external BIOS files.
- Scripting support using Lua.
- Turbo/fast-forward support by holding Tab.
- Rewind by holding Backquote.
- Frameskip, configurable up to 10.
- Screenshot support.
- Cheat code support.
- 9 savestate slots. Savestates are also viewable as screenshots.
- Video, GIF, WebP, and APNG recording.
- e-Reader support.
- Remappable controls for both keyboards and gamepads.
- Loading from ZIP and 7z files.
- IPS, UPS and BPS patch support.
- Game debugging via a command-line interface and GDB remote support, compatible
with Ghidra and IDA Pro.
- Configurable emulation rewinding.
- Support for loading and exporting GameShark and Action Replay snapshots.
- Cores available for RetroArch/Libretro and OpenEmu.
- Community-provided translations for several languages via
[Weblate](https://hosted.weblate.org/engage/mgba).
- Many, many smaller things.

#### Game Boy mappers

The following mappers are fully supported:

- MBC1
- MBC1M
- MBC2
- MBC3
- MBC3+RTC
- MBC30
- MBC5
- MBC5+Rumble
- MBC7
- Wisdom Tree (unlicensed)
- NT "old type" 1 and 2 (unlicensed multicart)
- NT "new type" (unlicensed MBC5-like)
- Pokémon Jade/Diamond (unlicensed)
- Sachen MMC1 (unlicensed)

The following mappers are partially supported:

- MBC6 (missing flash memory write support)
- MMM01
- Pocket Cam
- TAMA5 (incomplete RTC support)
- HuC-1 (missing IR support)
- HuC-3 (missing IR support)
- Sachen MMC2 (missing alternate wiring support)
- BBD (missing logo switching)
- Hitek (missing logo switching)
- GGB-81 (missing logo switching)
- Li Cheng (missing logo switching)

### Planned features

- Networked multiplayer link cable support.
- Dolphin/JOY bus link cable support.
- MP2k audio mixing, for higher quality sound than hardware.
- Re-recording support for tool-assist runs.
- A comprehensive debug suite.
- Wireless adapter support.

Supported Platforms
-------------------

- Windows 7 or newer
- Mac OS X 10.9 (Mavericks)[<sup>[3]</sup>](#osxver) or newer
- Linux
- AmigaOS4
- FreeBSD
- Nintendo 3DS
- Nintendo Switch
- Wii
- PlayStation Vita

Other Unix-like platforms, such as OpenBSD, are known to work as well, but are
untested and not fully supported.

### System requirements

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, with OpenGL 3.2 or newer for shaders and advanced features.

Downloads
---------

Downloads can be found on the official website, in the [Downloads][downloads]
section. The source code can be found on [GitHub][source].

Controls
--------

Controls are configurable in the settings menu. Many game controllers should be
automatically mapped by default. The default keyboard controls are as follows:

- **A**: X
- **B**: Z
- **L**: A
- **R**: S
- **Start**: Enter
- **Select**: Backspace

Compiling
---------

Compiling requires using CMake 3.1 or newer. GCC, Clang, and Visual Studio 2019
are known to work for compiling mGBA.

#### Docker building

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.

Note: If you are on an older Windows system before Windows 10, you may need to
configure your Docker to use VirtualBox shared folders to correctly map your
current `mgba` checkout directory to the Docker image's working directory. (See
issue [#1985](https://mgba.io/i/1985) for details.)

To use a Docker image to build mGBA, simply run the following command while in
the root of an mGBA checkout:

	docker run --rm -it -v ${PWD}:/home/mgba/src mgba/windows:w32

After starting the Docker container, it 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:

- mgba/3ds
- mgba/switch
- mgba/ubuntu:xenial
- mgba/ubuntu:bionic
- mgba/ubuntu:focal
- mgba/ubuntu:groovy
- mgba/vita
- mgba/wii
- mgba/windows:w32
- mgba/windows:w64

If you want to speed up the build process, consider adding the flag `-e
MAKEFLAGS=-jN` to do a parallel build for mGBA with `N` number of CPU cores.

#### *nix building

To use CMake to build on a Unix-based system, the recommended commands are as
follows:

	mkdir build
	cd build
	cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX:PATH=/usr ..
	make
	sudo make install

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.

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:

	brew install cmake ffmpeg libzip qt5 sdl2 libedit lua pkg-config
	mkdir build
	cd build
	cmake -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=`brew --prefix qt5` ..
	make

Note that you should not do a `make install` on macOS, as it will not work
properly.

#### Windows developer building

##### MSYS2

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):

	pacman -Sy --needed base-devel git
${MINGW_PACKAGE_PREFIX}-{cmake,ffmpeg,gcc,gdb,libelf,libepoxy,libzip,lua,pkgconf
,qt5,SDL2,ntldd-git}

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:

	mkdir -p mgba/build
	cd mgba/build
	cmake .. -G "MSYS Makefiles"
	make -j$(nproc --ignore=1)

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. 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.
`../src/platform/wii/CMakeToolchain.txt`

### Dependencies

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.
- libedit: for command-line debugger support.
- ffmpeg or libav: for video, GIF, WebP, and APNG recording.
- libzip or zlib: for loading ROMs stored in zip files.
- SQLite3: for game databases.
- libelf: for ELF loading.
- Lua: for scripting.
- json-c: for the scripting `storage` API.

SQLite3, libpng, and zlib are included with the emulator, so they do not need to
be externally compiled first.

Footnotes
---------

<a name="missing">[1]</a> Currently missing features are

- OBJ window for modes 3, 4 and 5 ([Bug #5](http://mgba.io/b/5))

<a name="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.

<a name="osxver">[3]</a> 10.9 is only needed for the Qt port. It may be possible
to build or running the Qt port on 10.7 or older, but this is not officially
supported. The SDL port is known to work on 10.5, and may work on older.

[downloads]: http://mgba.io/downloads.html
[source]: https://github.com/mgba-emu/mgba/

Copyright
---------

mGBA is Copyright © 2013 - 2024 Jeffrey Pfau. It is distributed under the
[Mozilla Public License version 2.0](https://www.mozilla.org/MPL/2.0/). A copy
of the license is available in the distributed LICENSE file.

mGBA contains the following third-party libraries:

- [inih](https://github.com/benhoyt/inih), which is copyright © 2009 - 2020 Ben
Hoyt and used under a BSD 3-clause license.
- [LZMA SDK](http://www.7-zip.org/sdk.html), which is public domain.
- [MurmurHash3](https://github.com/aappleby/smhasher) implementation by Austin
Appleby, which is public domain.
- [getopt for MSVC](https://github.com/skandhurkat/Getopt-for-Visual-Studio/),
which is public domain.
- [SQLite3](https://www.sqlite.org), which is public domain.

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.