gameboi advance

A Game Boy Advance emulator built upon the GBC emulator gameboi

Features

gameboiadvance does not aim to be the perfect emulator, its features are limited compared to other emulators.

• Accurate ARM7 emulation
• Scanline based PPU emulation
• APU emulation (based on gameboi)
• Accurate DMA interleaving
• EEPROM, FLASH and SRAM save-load capability
• RTC support (sadly, no other GPIO extensions)
• Gamepak prefetch emulation
• Disassembler and a powerful debugger
  • Capable of showing all the internals of the emulator
  • Execution and data access breakpoint support

Feature TODO

• SIO emulation, and networked multiplayer support

Screenshots

Using as a library

gameboiadvance library can be easily integrated to your own frontend implementation:

#include <gba/core.h>

// WITH_DEBUGGER can be set with CMake argument -DWITH_DEBUGGER=ON
#if WITH_DEBUGGER
  #include <gba_debugger/debugger.h>
#endif // WITH_DEBUGGER

void on_scanline(const gba::u8 line_number, const gba::ppu::scanline_buffer& buffer) noexcept;
void on_vblank() noexcept;
void on_audio(const gba::vector<gba::apu::stereo_sample<float>>& buffer) noexcept;

int main(int argc, char* argv[]) 
{
    // BIOS is required to boot
    gba::core core{"file/path/to/bios.gba"};
    core.load_pak("file/path/to/rom.gba");

#if WITH_DEBUGGER
    gba::debugger::window debugger_window(&core);

    while(true) {
        // debugger window handles input, video and audio output
        debugger_window.tick();
    }
#else
    core.on_scanline_event().add_delegate(gba::connect_arg<&on_scanline>);
    core.on_vblank_event().add_delegate(gba::connect_arg<&on_vblank>);
    core.sound_buffer_overflow_event().add_delegate(gba::connect_arg<&on_audio>);

    // optionally set audio generation parameters
    // core.set_dst_sample_rate(some_audio_device.sample_rate());
    // core.set_sound_buffer_capacity(some_audio_device.sample_count());

    while(true) {
        // core.press_key(gba::keypad::key::a);
        // core.release_key(gba::keypad::key::start);

        core.tick_one_frame();
        // or core.tick(n); which executes at least `n` cycles every iteration
    }
#endif // WITH_DEBUGGER

    return 0;
}

Compiling

Dependencies

• CMake 3.16
• fmt (as git submodule)
• spdlog (as git submodule)
• SFML
• SDL2 (for sound only)

Install dependencies however you like. Below example is installing using vcpkg, in Ubuntu:

$ git clone https://github.com/Microsoft/vcpkg.git
$ ./vcpkg/bootstrap-vcpkg.sh -disableMetrics
$ ./vcpkg/vcpkg install sfml sdl2
$ sudo apt install cmake

Compile using CMake

gameboiadvance uses CMake and can be easily built with a script like below.

$ mkdir build && cd build
$ cmake --config Release --target gameboiadvance ..
$ cmake --build -- -j $(nproc)