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What is the best GBA emulator?

6
Posts
4
Years
  • Age 119
  • Seen Jan 19, 2021
I've bought My Boy to use on my Samsung device and haven't had any issues. Not sure if there is a better alternative for mobile users, though.
 
1
Posts
4
Years
  • Age 32
  • Seen Sep 25, 2019
On window, you can use browser Chrome or Firefox go to this website:
handleheldgame.vn/list-game-gba.html
Has some game pokemon hack as Pokemon Liquid Crystal, Pokemon Advanced Adventures. if you need any game pokemon hack, you can request.
 
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173
Posts
4
Years
  • Age 28
  • Seen Feb 4, 2024
For Windows, VBA-M is recommended, it emulates more accuracy than common VBA.
For Android, GBA.emu is recommended, it uses VBA-M core. MyBoy can trade pokemon but sound emulates a bit buggy, especially SFXes.
 
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16
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9
Years
I dont.
I patch the file and put in on my Revo K1 card and Im playing it on the Revo K101+.
There is nothing like playing real time, on a small screen lightweight handheld with fysical buttons.
 

itsdarsh

Contender
20
Posts
4
Years
Please stop recommending VBA. It has not been updated since 2004, and GBA emulation has come a long way since then. As such, it is an inaccurate emulator and games that run fine on hardware may end up glitching on it, and vice versa. Thus, you may have bugs on VBA that you would not have on any other emulator, and chances are quite a few devs will ignore your bug reports if they're aware you're playing on VBA. It also has potential security vulnerabilities, but to be fair I don't know if the average user would ever have to worry about them. You should not be developing your hacks with VBA in mind, and VBA users should strongly consider upgrading if they want to play their favorite hacks.

VBA-M is a fine successor, but outside audio performance the most accurate emulator is mGBA. Whichever emulator you like more is up to you, but if you want your game to run on real hardware and want some semblance of a debugging environment then you should be testing on mGBA as much as possible.
 
19,142
Posts
11
Years
Please stop recommending VBA. It has not been updated since 2004, and GBA emulation has come a long way since then. As such, it is an inaccurate emulator and games that run fine on hardware may end up glitching on it, and vice versa. Thus, you may have bugs on VBA that you would not have on any other emulator, and chances are quite a few devs will ignore your bug reports if they're aware you're playing on VBA. It also has potential security vulnerabilities, but to be fair I don't know if the average user would ever have to worry about them. You should not be developing your hacks with VBA in mind, and VBA users should strongly consider upgrading if they want to play their favorite hacks.

VBA-M is a fine successor, but outside audio performance the most accurate emulator is mGBA. Whichever emulator you like more is up to you, but if you want your game to run on real hardware and want some semblance of a debugging environment then you should be testing on mGBA as much as possible.

I've tried all of these and I do agree that, performance and graphic-wise, mGBA is the best one out of all three.

The only caveat though, and the reason why I don't use it regularly, is because I (seemingly) can't remap the speed up button. It's so much easier to press space while walking to speed up movement instead of the default assigned Tab. If it had that feature, I'd switch in a heartbeat.
 

laser_dolphin

BRRAP BRRAP PEW PEW
18
Posts
4
Years
  • Age 29
  • Seen Sep 13, 2022
I'm also using mGBA because the general consensus is that it is better than VBA.
 

bh02032002

Currently open for rom hack beta testing.
411
Posts
7
Years
If Your on pc definitely VBA if it's android 100% myboy that's just my suggestions/opinion though
 

Zet

7,690
Posts
16
Years
Gotta go with mGBA. If you're a fan on vba and want to stick with a very similar emulator then I would recommend it's spiritual successor, vba-m.
 
53
Posts
5
Years
  • Age 27
  • Seen Mar 9, 2022
I've tried all of these and I do agree that, performance and graphic-wise, mGBA is the best one out of all three.

The only caveat though, and the reason why I don't use it regularly, is because I (seemingly) can't remap the speed up button. It's so much easier to press space while walking to speed up movement instead of the default assigned Tab. If it had that feature, I'd switch in a heartbeat.

You can change the key for speed up via Tools > Settings > Shortcuts and then under Emulation change the Fast Forward key.
 

Chronosplit

I play for keeps!
492
Posts
13
Years
  • Seen today
mGBA, Pizza Boy GBA or RetroArch's mGBA core for mobile/elsewhere. Like seriously there is no contest. VBA and even VBA-M are based on code that is both slower and less accurate. I could probably point out the flaws of every single other mention here, but to put it short most on PC tend to use outdated emus due to being used to them. You hear more anger about this in the SNES realm because ZSNES has people that still use it, which is a worse case than VBA (outside of that one security hole).

I used to be rather angry about this and even made a post or two in tutorials about it, but I've calmed down about the situation since then. Some still use old emus due to aged devices after all.
 
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6
Posts
3
Years
  • Age 23
  • Seen Jul 22, 2023
i use mGBA on windows. i have a really low end computer (it costs 100 at Walmart) and it runs amazingly
 
1
Posts
3
Years
  • Age 27
  • Seen Dec 24, 2021
Riley's Delta is the emulator I use and I'd say that it's in the top 5 of best emulators of all time. Definitely better than his GBA4ios which was also a really good emulator
 
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