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VisualBoy Advance is an emulator that allows you to play GameBoy Advance games on your PC

VisualBoy Advance is an emulator that allows you to play GameBoy Advance games on your PC

Vote: (750 votes)

Program license: Free

Developer: Ngemu

Version: 1.7.2

Works under: Windows

Also available for Mac

Vote:

Program license

(750 votes)

Free

Developer

Version

Ngemu

1.7.2

Works under:

Also available for

Windows

Mac

Pros

  • Compatible with an overwhelming majority of GBA cartridges
  • Comes with a suite of development tools built in
  • Supports different sized save files
  • Plays GB, GBC and GBA games
  • Emulates Super Game Boy functionality

Cons

  • May require some troubleshooting to play certain titles
  • Doesn't receive active updates
  • Refuses to play a few homebrew titles

VisualBoyAdvance is a video game emulator that can play games made for several different handheld consoles made by Nintendo. It supports read-only memory instructions designed for the original GameBoy, the Game Boy Color and the Game Boy Advance handhelds. Any ROM that would have worked with either revision of the Super Game Boy peripheral should also function as intended.

Features like save states and game rewind make it easy to blast through even the most complicated vintage titles. Games that would have lacked a save function when played on original hardware can still save their progress through VBA's enhanced ROM tools. Multiple states can exist simultaneously for the same game, so gamers can bookmark favorite levels or stages to go back to at a later time. They can also use this to get past particularly difficult parts of single-player games if necessary.

Players who want to enter cheats made for external devices that would have attached to a physical GBA handheld console shouldn't have any difficulty doing so either. Those who are serious about looking through everything that a game has to offer can combine both of these features to take things to the next level. Otherwise, they may want to take a closer look at the onboard Gameshark compatibility mode, which may appeal to a much wider section of the market.

Gameshark cheats were written with a specific piece of hardware in mind, but they should still work with VBA since they're essentially a list of memory coordinates that players entered into a table. Online searches often return huge collections of these cheat codes, which often work flawlessly with VBA. Once gamers have found some codes they like, the emulator can even save them so they can turn them on and off whenever they need to.

Original Game Boy ROMs play fine in VBA, though that console lacked color. The emulator allows players to select a color pallet in order to paint over the interface elements. While it won't ever look as good as a genuine color game, this does allow players to avoid the awkwardness that comes with running monochrome software. It's also possible to use a gray and green color scheme that closely matches the actual liquid crystal display found on original Game Boy handhelds. While it may have been derided in its own time, this display is now seen as nostalgic for many people. Enabling this feature may bring back some old memories as a result.

ROMs made for Game Boy Color look every bit as good as they did on the original hardware. VBA makes scaling these up or down simple and it even allows players to put them in a huge full screen window, though doing so will usually require the use of fairly significant letter and pillarbox elements in order to avoid stretching the screen. Those who are used to watching online movies without a true widescreen monitor are probably already used to this, so they shouldn't notice any difference at all.

As the name suggests, VBA really shines when playing Game Boy Advance games. It can scale them up to around twice their original resolution without seriously stretching the game screen. While this is hardly what some people might call high definition gaming, it certainly looks far better than what was offered by the original console. In many cases, it can actually sound better than real hardware as well.

While the original Game Boy Advance only has monophonic speakers, it can actually output dual stereo sound channels. This is actually true of the original Game Boy and GBC handhelds as well. When VBA is run on a personal computer that has stereo speakers or an attached pair of headphones, it will generate authentic stereo sound. Mono is used when there's only one speaker attached to the system, but it still usually sounds better than what came out of the elements hooked up to real GBA consoles.

Bluetooth users can take advantage of this flexibility by connecting a speaker to their PC wirelessly. VBA will use the default sound system exposed by Microsoft Windows, which means they won't have to do any extra configuration in order to get it working. Those who plan on connecting controllers and other devices wirelessly shouldn't have any problem either. VBA simply checks the operating system for input and output devices before providing them to players.

This also means that USB controllers will work just fine. All players have to do is head over to the input setup screen and tap the buttons that correspond to the actions they're looking for. It's theoretically possible to assign emulator functions to controller buttons as well, but this will normally take a little more configuration than many people are comfortable with.

A surfeit of drop-down menus coupled with logical keyboard shortcuts make this exercise academic anyway. You can easily access pretty much any of VBA's functions simply by pushing one of the F-keys located at the top of a full-sized computer keyboard. Laptops might not have these keys, which is why the interface still supports mouse-driven events as well as Alt key combinations.

Keyboard accessories work with VBA, however, which means that this may not be a problem even for those who are playing with very small netbook machines. Plug a full-sized USB keyboard into a PC and VBA will be able to use it as soon as Windows recognizes it. Players can set any action button directly to a key, which means they're free to use big keyboard as controllers if they prefer. This works with Bluetooth keyboards as well, further helping to increase the appeal among those who are serious gamers.

While VBA is technically an older application, it was built in such a way that it can take full advantage of many innovations that weren't commonly available at the time of its original release. That's made it popular for a number of uses that have only come around in recent years. Perhaps the most common use case for VisualBoyAdvance is among those who want to play Pokémon titles through an emulator, and it offers some features that should prove especially useful to those who plan on doing so.

Early first and second generation titles should work out of the box without any extra configuration. Hacks of those titles shouldn't throw any error messages either, which makes VBA an attractive option for gamers who want to explore the sometimes unreliable world of fangames and homebrew titles. Though VBA does perform at least a rudimentary checksum test, it should allow players to run games even if they don't quite match their header code.

Compatibility is good across almost all commercial titles in general regardless of whether they're designed with onboard roleplaying elements or not. The only games that players may find don't work reliably are some of the various homebrew ROMs they may come across online. Since VBA doesn't have an active update function, it may be impossible to play a few of these titles, but this problem is associated with something that most people would consider an edge case at best.

When it comes to third generation Pokémon titles and their various hacks, gamers shouldn't have too much difficulty but they'll need to make some adjustments before they can create an effective save file. Starting up a new game on one of these titles will throw up an error message that claims that something called the 1m sub-circuit board is not installed. This comes from the fact that the underlying game code doesn't realize it isn't running on physical hardware and believes part of the cartridge itself may be missing.

Players can easily correct this by changing the type of save file to a 128k flash ROM object. They'll be able to play without doing so, but the game won't be able to continue after beating a group of trainers known as the Elite Four. Otherwise, though, VBA is an ideal application for these kinds of games. A handful of other properties use special save techniques, so it's important to mess with these configuration options before explicitly stating that something works as intended.

Nevertheless, it's important to view this as a feature rather than a bug. Some programmers made some very unusual decisions when creating actual commercial GBA titles and VisualBoyAdvance is simply trying to appeal to the widest possible number of potential configurations. Those who really start to get into this side of the retrogaming hobby will enjoy the additional tools that VBA comes with.

A handful of development features are baked into VBA's code, which gives programmers the freedom to check memory coordinates and see how a ROM's instructions execute on the simulated ARM7TDMI microchip. Since ARM7TDMI chips only support a reduced instruction set, those who are used to writing for x86_64 processors may be unfamiliar with some of the idiosyncrasies that come from that kind of environment. VBA's debugging tools will help to smooth the transition.

Dumpers and those who make backup copies of ROMs will also appreciate this feature. They'll be able to see whether or not their file works correctly simply by looking at a handful of error messages. Professional game developers who are making new ROMs for distribution online may also want to rely on these error messages, though they might want to supplement them with a dedicated programming tool.

Several different ROM formats have come about over the years, but most modern dumpers should produce something that makes sense to VBA. Those who are having problems playing a specific game they dumped themselves might want to check their hardware before they start to mess around with too many emulator configuration options. The software is platform-neutral to the point where this usually isn't the issue.

The emphasis on platform-neutrality has also made it so that gamers can share save files with those who run other operating systems. While the most popular version of VBA runs on Windows, there are also versions for BSD-based computers as well as Apple's Macintosh platform. Players can swap save states and ROMs with users of VBA software on any of these platforms. They can even start a game on their PC and then take the state to another device, such as a game console running a special version of VBA. That makes it possible to trade games with machines that wouldn't otherwise have been capable of even running any sort of emulator.

Aftermarket additions to VBA make it possible to use it as part of a social gaming experience. For instance, players can integrate it with an IRC bot that enables a form of network play. Primitive networking functions are built into the software anyway, which makes it possible to play games online that were never designed for it. Those who are interested in simply trading in-game items between two ROMs they have on their local drive shouldn't have too much difficulty doing the same.

Forked packages for VBA are easy to install alongside of the main one, so those who are interested in further expanding the base functionality can do so. Plugins allow those who want to explore software beyond just games to achieve some of their loftiest coding goals. Nevertheless, this may only appeal to a small subset of those who want to use VBA.

Chances are that an overwhelming majority of VBA users will only rely on the basic emulator functions and forget that all of these advance features are here. Those who need them, though, should find that VisualBoyAdvance offers all of the tools they need to take the retrogaming hobby to the next level.

Pros

  • Compatible with an overwhelming majority of GBA cartridges
  • Comes with a suite of development tools built in
  • Supports different sized save files
  • Plays GB, GBC and GBA games
  • Emulates Super Game Boy functionality

Cons

  • May require some troubleshooting to play certain titles
  • Doesn't receive active updates
  • Refuses to play a few homebrew titles