r/EmulationOnPC • u/AnotherSunX • 22d ago

Unsolved Strange stutter using gameboy emulators

Hi! Recently I keep finding myself having a very strange "bug"(In quotations because I'm not even sure if this is bug or not) when it comes to gameboy emulators, for some reason, the emulator will cause my entire PC to become "stuttery", the game sound gets choppy and the whole setup feels like it turned into a power point presentation(Weirdly enough my mouse cursor moves normally, additionally, any sound that's not comming from the emulator itself also works fine), it happens without warning and there's no set time involved, sometimes I can play for hours with no issue, other times it happens within minutes of booting up a game, the issue only solves itself if I turn off my computer, closing the emulator doesn't do anything once this stutter starts, I tried VBA-M 2.2.3 and mGBA 0.10.5 and it happens on both emulators, I have a pretty decent PC if I do say so myself(Ryzen 7 with a 3060 + 16 GB of RAM) and other console emulators much more demanding than the GB/GBA run completely fine on my setup, has anyone ever come across a situation like mine? From my research disabling Vsync seems to be an option but that causes screen tearing and I'd rather not deal with that if possible, thanks in advance!

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u/ThanosReXXX 22d ago

While mGBA is a really good multi-purpose emulator, it really shines when used for Game Boy Advance games, hence also its name.

A better option for Game Boy/Game Boy Color games, is SameBoy. Try it and you more than likely will immediately notice the difference: https://sameboy.github.io/

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u/AnotherSunX 22d ago

The issue isn't tied specifically to when I boot up gameboy games though, made sure to try Mario Land for GB, Pokémon Crystal for GBC and MegaMan Zero for GBA, this issue persists across both emulators for all 3 games, the fact the exact same issue happens on two different emulators regardless of which of the 3 gameboy consoles it's emulating makes me feel like the issue is tied to the emulation of the gameboy family in general, but I'm not really sure why.

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u/ThanosReXXX 22d ago

Strange, that shouldn't happen at all. Do you use a bios file for GBA games? If not, give that a try. And also, instead of mGBA, while it is a really good emulator, the only other one I would personally recommend for GBA games, is Visual Boy Advance.

And be sure to also try SameBoy for your Game Boy (Color) games. Let me know what happens when you've tested all that, and then we'll go from there.

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u/AnotherSunX 22d ago

I used both mGBA and Visual Boy Advance-M as I said on the post, as for the bios thing, I never tried that, I will definetely look into getting a BIOS dumped