mGBA reaches stable v0.5.0, GB/GBC support added
While the RetroArch team have made many improvements to all of the emulator cores since Rejuvenate and Henkaku have come out, there are a few other developers who are actively working on non-RA emulators as alternatives such as cpajuste‘s port of ScummVM for the Vita and endrift‘s mGBA. mGBA has been around since Rejuvenate came out and while it isn’t yet as full speed as many of us would like, the latest stable release of mGBA that brought it from v0.4 to 0.5 has enough improvements and added features worthy of reporting on, with the main one being that now you can also play Gameboy and Gameboy Color on it, making it the first Vita emulator to support all three versions of the Gameboy. Retroarch’s gPSP and VBA are made to only run Gameboy Advance games (at least last time I checked).
What is mGBA?
mGBA is an Gameboy/Color/Advance emulator developer by endrift. While it does not yet boast full speed emulation for many games (popular ones such as Golden Sun are still chug a lot) it is the only emulator on the PS Vita (and 3DS) to support all three systems. It is now again being actively developed by endrift and other developers and you can check the source here if you want to help with it. If you aren’t a savvy developer, endrift also states:
Furthermore, if you enjoy using mGBA and wish to give back, there is now a list of ways to donate on the donations page, including the newly launched mGBA Patreon.
Changelog for mGBA 0.5.0
I shall only focus on the Vita-related major changes to the emulator. For a full list including 3DS and Wii you can check here.
Features:
- Game Boy support
- Support for encrypted CodeBreaker GBA cheats
- Emulation of Vast Fame protected GBA carts (taizou)
- Tile viewer
- Threaded rendering mode
- Libretro: Memory map and achievement support (leiradel)
- GUI: Add UI control remapping
- GUI: Add fast-forward
- Ability to temporarily load a savegame
- Load specific files out of archives
- Automatic BIOS detection
Bugfixes:
- PSP2: Fix GPU crash while exiting
- PSP2: Fix VSync
- PSP2: Fix accelerometer range
- PSP2: Actually load screen mode setting
- PSP2: Fix gyroscope direction
- PSP2: Delete threads after they return
- PSP2: Fix mapping/unmapping from not at 0
- PSP2: Use system font for menus
- PSP2: Add rumble for PS TV
- PSP2: Add fit-to-height screen mode
- PSP2: Sync files per descriptor
- PSP2: Allow UTF-8 filenames
- PSP2: Screenshots are now saved into the Photo Gallery
- PSP2: Stop underclocking when menuing
Download mGBA
To get your hands on the latest release of mGBA all you have to is go to the download page on the emulator’s website here or as usual just click here for the direct download link. If you want the Wii or 3DS versions (or Windows/Mac/Linux) you should go to the website and get the downloads from there.
first
stupid first is *** what are you sending push notifications to your phone for wololo? sad loser
Thank you, but i want play psp game on vita ver 3.60 , can’t someone do it?
Your mother can
wop this is great actually some days back im been wondering if they were actually working on those emus.. can you confirm any other work in the others emus?
can’t browse (up) to select where my gba files are stored, exits back to splash page everytime i try going (up)
Put the roms into a folder in /data/ or /mgba/ (I forget which one I have set up). mGBA can’t go back to the root.
It must have been Retroarch Gpsp that i used before, It did let me Navigate to a GBA folder that had games in on the root – think I got the wrong one 🙁
i just moved it with vitashell, its good now 🙂
Thank you very much for developing a such beautiful emulaters
Thank you devs
Salaam Aleikum
Thank you, this emu is so awesome.
Please, add some shaders when you have some spare time..
Still no savestates though. 🙁
savestates works, just press triangle
Typhoon, while I appreciate the quantity of articles you’ve posted, sometimes the reporting quality is a bit lacking. Namely, you need to proof-read your posts. There are far too many grammatical errors like “emulator developer by endrift” and “such as Golden Sun are still chug a lot”. Also, you lack the objective voice that Wololo maintains in most of his writings, as your biases find their way into many of your articles. This one in particular is not a problem, but trash-talking Sony is not exactly what I would expect from high-quality journalism, even if there are some valid criticisms. All opinions should be stated as such, and in a respectful manner.
This is a gaming site, so maybe I’m taking things too seriously… But I just wanted to express my concern because it does impact my experience and satisfaction here on Wololo.net.
0.5.0 can’t load *.zip of GBA ROM under ux0:data/mGBA/ of folder. Then I copy the *.gba file of ROM into ux0:data/mGBA/ still not working.
I can’t figure that out yet either… some rom seem to work some don’t… if u have conflicting rom in a folder with it then the whole folder is not shown in the emu. Yet at the same time the sav files from previous emu is shown in the emu and vitashell show all the file… maybe future update might fix it but I don’t see a user tweak to fix it.
A few more tinkering…i read 7z support…. and messing with another emu with similar issue…. the folder itself still had issue until i made a new one in vitashell and then the emu saw it but it finally see it all and run if the game is in the 7z archive. The save file save outside of it so that fine… 7z -_-” go figure why you cant read gba file easily…