It is widely agreed that the GameBoy Advance has a huge selection of quality titles by both Nintendo and non-Nintendo fans. As a result, emulators for this great portable are still being developed and updated with the latest release being mGBA 0.7.2.
What is mGBA?
As its name suggests, mGBA is a GameBoy Advance emulator that’s still in development but it also emulates the original GameBoy and GameBoy Colour.
mGBA on the PSVita in action playing TLZ: The Minish Cap
This emulator that is mainly developed by endrift, which focuses on accuracy and good performance on lower-end hardware, is available for a wide variety of systems including the PSVita, Nintendo Wii, Switch and 3DS other than versions for Windows, macOS and Linux. It must also be noted that these ports are all derived from the same codebase and get updated simultaneously so when an update lands, every port gets the new features if the hardware supports them. Among the features that mGBA has, we find:
- Save state support
- GameBoy Camera, Super GameBoy and GameBoy Printer support
- A Bilinear filter on desktop versions
- The ability to render the 3D assets of games at higher resolutions similar to HD Mode 7 in bsnes – This feature is only available in Nightly builds
- Cheat code support, customisable button mappings and FPS counter among other features
What does mGBA 0.7.2 bring along?
mGBA 0.7.2 is mostly a bug fix update and it doesn’t include the High-Res mode recently added but that may come soon in an official release
mGBA 0.7.2 is a minor update although it brings some important features to console ports. Its changelog includes:
- Improved frame drawing speed on the PSVita
- On the 3DS, a fix has been made to ensure that core 2 can be used for the threaded renderer
- This fixes freezing/hanging issues on non-CFW New 3DS consoles
- The aspect ratio on the Wii port was fixed to make it a tad more accurate
- Numerous memory leaks were fixed on all versions of the emulator
- Fixes relating to the Qt UI
- Many accuracy improvements including the implementation of mosaic on transformed sprites which was an long standing bug opened in 2013, fixes to DMA and timing adjustments to the original GameBoy emulation section
Unfortunately, mGBA 0.7.2 doesn’t contain any major feature or the recently introduced High-Res mode to the emulator although mGBA 0.8 will probably be a bigger release which should bring numerous features according to the emulator’s timeline. Other than mGBA, there’s also medusa by the same developer in the works which is a Nintendo DS emulator but currently, the focus is on mGBA instead.
Conclusion
To grab mGBA, follow the link below and select the platform of your choice and you may also support the emulator’s development on Patreon through the link below. On another note, the PSVita recently received a ZX Spectrum emulator called ZXVita and RetroGuru Team ported Fruit’Y to it which is an original game inspired by Gem’X!
mGBA download link: https://mgba.io/downloads.html
mGBA Patreon (donation): https://www.patreon.com/mgba
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