VisualBoyAdvance (commonly abbreviated as VBA) is a free
emulator of the
Game Boy,
Game Boy Color
The (commonly abbreviated as GBC) is a handheld game console, manufactured by Nintendo, which was released in Japan on October 21, 1998 and to international markets that November. It is the successor to the Game Boy and is part of the Game ...
, and
Game Boy Advance handheld game consoles as well as of
Super Game Boy and
Super Game Boy 2
The is a peripheral that allows Game Boy cartridges to be played on a Super Nintendo Entertainment System console. Released in June 1994, it retailed for $59.99 in the United States and £49.99 in the United Kingdom. In South Korea, it is calle ...
.
Besides the
DirectX
Microsoft DirectX is a collection of application programming interfaces (APIs) for handling tasks related to multimedia, especially game programming and video, on Microsoft platforms. Originally, the names of these APIs all began with "Direct", ...
version for the Windows platform, there is also one that is based on the free
platform independent graphics library SDL. This is available for a variety of operating systems including
Linux,
BSD
The Berkeley Software Distribution or Berkeley Standard Distribution (BSD) is a discontinued operating system based on Research Unix, developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berk ...
,
Mac OS X, and
BeOS
BeOS is an operating system for personal computers first developed by Be Inc. in 1990. It was first written to run on BeBox hardware.
BeOS was positioned as a multimedia platform that could be used by a substantial population of desktop users a ...
. VisualBoyAdvance has also been ported to
AmigaOS 4,
AROS Aros may refer to:
*Aros (Middle-earth), a river in J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth legendarium
* Aros, Mull, the location of Aros Castle, a ruined 13th-century castle on the Isle of Mull, Scotland
*AROS Research Operating System, a free software i ...
,
GameCube
The is a home video game console developed and released by Nintendo in Japan on September 14, 2001, in North America on November 18, 2001, and in PAL territories in 2002. It is the successor to the Nintendo 64 (1996), and predecessor of the Wii ...
,
Wii
The Wii ( ) is a home video game console developed and marketed by Nintendo. It was released on November 19, 2006, in North America and in December 2006 for most other Regional lockout, regions of the world. It is Nintendo's fifth major ho ...
,
webOS, and
Zune HD.
History
The VisualBoyAdvance project was started by a developer under the
online alias "Forgotten". When this person left the development of the emulator, the project was handed over to a team named "VBA Team", led by Forgotten's brother. Development on the original VisualBoyAdvance stopped in 2004 with version 1.8.0 beta 3, and a number of
forked versions were made by various developers in the years since then, such as VisualBoyAdvance-M.
VBA was a crucial component of
Twitch Plays Pokémon, a social experiment in which thousands of button inputs collected from the viewership of the streaming website
Twitch were fed into an emulated version of
Pokémon Red.
Viewers typed commands into the chat function, which was then fed into the VBA emulator via an
IRC bot.
They succeeded after 16 days of continuous play, with a peak concurrent viewership of 121,000 and over 1.1 million unique participants.
VisualBoyAdvance-M
VisualBoyAdvance-M, or simply VBA-M, is an improved
fork from the inactive VisualBoyAdvance project,
adding several features as well as maintaining an up-to-date codebase. After VisualBoyAdvance became inactive in 2004, several forks began to appear such as VBALink, which allowed users to emulate the linking of two Game Boy devices. Eventually, VBA-M was created, which merged several of the forks into one codebase. Thus, the ''M'' in VBA-M stands for ''Merge''. VBA-M is
backwards compatible
Backward or Backwards is a relative direction.
Backwards or Sdrawkcab (the word "backwards" with its letters reversed) may also refer to:
* "Backwards" (''Red Dwarf''), episode of sci-fi TV sitcom ''Red Dwarf''
** ''Backwards'' (novel), a nov ...
with
Game Boy and
Game Boy Color
The (commonly abbreviated as GBC) is a handheld game console, manufactured by Nintendo, which was released in Japan on October 21, 1998 and to international markets that November. It is the successor to the Game Boy and is part of the Game ...
.
VBA-M's GBA emulation core was ported into
RetroArch/
Libretro
RetroArch is a free and open-source, cross-platform frontend for emulators, game engines, video games, media players and other applications. It is the reference implementation of the libretro API, designed to be fast, lightweight, portable and w ...
, without the GB, GBC and SGB cores. as well as a modified version called VBA-Next.
VBA-GX is a port of VBA-M to
Nintendo Wii. It enables
motion controls for emulated Game Boy Advance games.
Reception
The VisualBoyAdvance became the most popular GBA emulator for the Unix platform and the emulator contributed "greatly" to the late years of GBA game development by providing a suite of development and visual debugging tools for developers who wanted to create games that surpassed even Nintendo's own.
A port from VBA's code was used as the foundation of the Visual Boy Zune, an emulator of the
Zune HD.
Wesley Akkerman from the Dutch computer magazine ''
Computer!Totaal'' named the VisualBoyAdvance as one of the best Game Boy emulators alongside the mGBA, owing to its variety of features and customization options.
In a review on the tech blog ''Techilife'' the VisualBoyAdvance has been named the oldest and most reliable Gameboy Advance emulator and has been praised for its ease of use.
See also
*
List of video game emulators
References
External links
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Visualboyadvance
Amiga emulation software
AmigaOS 4 software
BeOS software
Free video game console emulators
Game Boy Advance emulators
Game Boy emulators
Linux emulation software
MacOS emulation software
Multi-emulators
Portable software
Windows emulation software