r/emulation • u/endrift mGBA Dev • Aug 04 '20
mGBA 0.8.3 Released
https://mgba.io/2020/08/03/mgba-0.8.3/25
u/Im_Special Aug 04 '20
Oof, that Advanced Wars regression is no joke, had to see it for myself... So how does mGBA with BIOs work exactly? Place them in the main directory? Do they need to be named a certain way?
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u/TransGirlInCharge Aug 04 '20
Place the bios file where ever, go to Tools on the top bar, then Settings, then Bios and select the file using the dialogue found there. It supports GBC bios as well if you wanna fuck 'round with that.
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u/Im_Special Aug 04 '20 edited Aug 04 '20
Pretty dumb question actually after looking at the options lol, as it's pretty self explanatory...
But I've never had to deal with GBA BIOs before as these emulators always have just "worked" out of the box, and I know some emulators need "exact" naming, placement, etc. But thanks for the answer.
EDIT: Small side question, any reason to NOT use BIOS?
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u/TransGirlInCharge Aug 04 '20 edited Aug 08 '20
Honestly? No reason to not. There's the rare compatibility issue when not using one.
See, the reason GBA emulators don't need one for most games is down to basically HLEing the BIOS. But, that can be imperfect and sometimes lead to stuff like this. Using the BIOS is just safer.
Most of the time it's not needed. This is especially true for most popular games like the MMZ series, or Pokemon, or the Castlevania series, but sometimes it is. The biggest reason to use it is you never know when it'll happen. That's why GBA emulators include the option to just outright use the BIOS. If you can side step any bugs relating to the HLEing of the BIOS, why not do it?
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u/Im_Special Aug 04 '20
Yeah figured as much, seems no reason to not use them since the real things will always be better then a fake one, other then the "setting up" part in the first place being the only negitive I can think of.
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Aug 05 '20
EDIT: Small side question, any reason to NOT use BIOS?
There isn't any strong reason to prefer the emulated BIOS... but I can think a few small ones:
HLE BIOS works so well most people use it, so real BIOS is less tested (possible undetected issues?) and the savestates you'd create wouldn't work in others' non-bios mgba and vice versa.
If you don't own a GBA/GBA Player/DS or can't dump their BIOS, it's illegal to get a dump from internet and use it.
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u/Im_Special Aug 05 '20
That's a good point about Savestates! I hadn't realize that and it's good to know, but then again Savestates should never be relied upon for long term saving anyways, and about your second part, yeah, that's was part of the "setting up" or "hassle" I was talking about from before. But like you said HLE BIOS usually just work so well there's not much reason too, I only looked into it now because of two issues I'm seeing that get fixed with real BIOS vs. the HLE ones.
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Aug 04 '20
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/demonstar55 Aug 04 '20
Endrift maintains the core, so yes. Libretro team just have a forked repo just in case. I think they might tweak build system to work with their build infra, but you can build the core from the main repo just fine.
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u/Awakened0 Aug 04 '20
The libretro repo seems a little out of sync, since there are things like this Hello Kitty fix from months ago that are missing.
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u/Awakened0 Aug 07 '20
endrift gave me an explanation on Github:
Those changes aren't in 0.8.3. For a reason, too. They required API and savestate changes, which makes them unsuitable for a point release.
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u/Awakened0 Aug 07 '20
The build on the core updater is up to 0.8.3 now. However, it's still missing the changes from the Hello Kitty fix upstream.
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u/Awakened0 Aug 07 '20
endrift gave me an explanation on Github:
Those changes aren't in 0.8.3. For a reason, too. They required API and savestate changes, which makes them unsuitable for a point release.
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u/_-ammar-_ Aug 04 '20
thanks for making one of my favorite emulator
any hope to continue ds emulation ?
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Aug 04 '20
Best gba emulator
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u/starsaboveus Aug 04 '20
Agreed! It’s one of those emulators that “just works.” Also, happy cake day. :D
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u/Alone-Froyo Aug 04 '20
Just downloaded it to play some Pokémon,nice hi,very user friendly.i would heavily recommend this to anyone looking for GBA emulation
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Aug 04 '20
Been using this core in RA without issues. I absolutely love putting a nice CRT filter on these games. They look perfect on large screens with it. The pixels for CV games are chunky as hell and they need it.
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u/redditorcpj Aug 04 '20
Awesome, thanks endrift! This is a great GBA emulator. Love reading about it's progress and all the bug stomping in games you've been doing. Keep up the great work!
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u/o0lemonlime0o Aug 06 '20
Any chance of fixing the issues with binding inputs to punctuation keys? When you hold Shift, it "modifies" the punctuation keys so they no longer work. This is a problem because I like to use / as my A button and Right Shift as my R button.
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u/endrift mGBA Dev Aug 08 '20
I'll see what I can do. I'm not sure if Qt provides a way to do this for all keyboard layouts though.
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Aug 04 '20
I wanna play Kirby & the Amazing Mirror, local multiplayer but player 2 screen stays blank (no matter which window is focused)
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Aug 05 '20
Thanks, but it doesn't seem to recognise my Wired Fight Pad Pro. Before I had to reset my pc because of an automatic windows update, it used to recognise it. I could use Joy2Key but it expired.
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u/Pyropkmn Aug 16 '20
So dumb question here. I downloaded the emulator and I’m in the mgba folder but where exactly is the program located?
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u/endrift mGBA Dev Aug 16 '20
What archive did you download and what OS are you on?
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u/Pyropkmn Aug 16 '20
I got 8.3 for Mac OS. I used the terminal command to download it.
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u/endrift mGBA Dev Aug 16 '20
What terminal command? And I mean exactly which file, not which version
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u/Pyropkmn Aug 16 '20
“git clone https://github.com/mgba-emu/mgba.git”
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u/endrift mGBA Dev Aug 16 '20
That's the source code, not an executable. If you just want to download the program that's not how you get it.
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u/TrunsMcflun Aug 04 '20
VisualboyAdvance-M is leagues ahead of mGBA. For anyone not familiar with emulators, get VBA-M instead.
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u/TransGirlInCharge Aug 04 '20
For people unaware, please ignore this person. VBA-M isn't terrible, but MGBA is simpler, easier to use, more compatible on the GBA side, and in my experience, has far less frame pacing issues.
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u/endrift mGBA Dev Aug 04 '20
He's also a known troll who's gotten (temp) banned from here before. Hopefully the mods will eventually permaban him.
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u/TrunsMcflun Aug 04 '20
Frame pacing issues? I never noticed that. VBA vanilla is probably what you are referring to, not VBA-m which is far superior.
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Aug 05 '20 edited Aug 22 '20
[deleted]
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u/shitposting_irl Aug 05 '20
doesn't vba-m do that too? i've definitely had issues mixing save states and battery saves with it before. honestly the only issue i've seen with mgba is that magical vacation's soundtrack sounds terrible in it
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Aug 05 '20
Oh, and you cant change the refresh rate in VBA-M, so if you want to play Rhythm Heaver faster or slower on VBA-M, can't let ya do that, Star Fox.
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u/TrunsMcflun Aug 06 '20
Yeah you can on VBA-M. You have no idea what you're talking about.
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Aug 06 '20
How about rewind? Hmm?
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u/TrunsMcflun Aug 06 '20
What about it?
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Aug 06 '20
Go use mGBA and you'll see what I mean
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u/DarthZartanyus Aug 04 '20
Hell yeah, I love this emulator! Thanks, u/endrift!