Sunday, February 10, 2008

VisualBoyAdvance

VisualBoyAdvance (also known as VBA) is a free emulator distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License. It emulates software targeted for the Game Boy, Super Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance handheld game consoles sold by Nintendo. As of 2006, VisualBoyAdvance is the most popular such emulator for Windows.

Besides the DirectX 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 like Linux,[ BSD, Mac OS X,[3] and BeOS.

History
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The VisualBoyAdvance project was started by Forgotten.[4] When he left the development of the emulator, the project was handed over to a team named VBA Team, led by hacker kxu. The VBA Team is currently understaffed, and work on the emulator has mostly ceased.

Features
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It includes these features:

* Save game state at any point
* Joystick support
* Speed up button
* Game Boy Printer emulation
* Super Game Boy border support
* Auto-fire support
* Realtime IPS patching (used by, most notably, fan translated games)
* Hacking capabilities, including search engine, Game Boy Gameshark and GameGenie support.
* GamesharkAdvance and CodeBreakerAdvance support
* GBA debugger in the SDL version
* Import Gameshark Game Saves, codes, etc...
* Import battery files from other emulators
* Export battery files to other emulators
* Sound recording
* Graphic filters to enhance display: 2xSaI, Super 2xSaI, Super Eagle, Pixelate and Motion Blur
* Full screen support
* Screen capture (through menu or configured key)
* Enhanced Skin engine
* Memory viewing and altering possibility
* Tile, I/O etc. viewers

Note that Gameshark codes can only work sometimes, as Gameshark codes only affect (this is most often the case) a file with a basic name identical to the original game.

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