VisualBoyAdvance

VisualBoyAdvance (commonly abbreviated as VBA) is a cross-platform emulator for the Game Boy, Super Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance game consoles. It is an inactive project superseded by VisualBoyAdvance-M (known as VBA-M), an improved fork that initially integrated features from earlier forks.

Installation

Install vbam-gtk from the official repositories or vba-m-gtk-svn from the AUR.

Usage

Run VBA-M with the following.

vbam ~/path/to/rom.gba

Tip: Extensions may vary depending on what console the ROM is for. VBA-M can also open compressed .zip archives containing a ROM.

To open a ROM in full screen, with debug messages and emulation speed display disabled, run:

vbam -F -N --no-show-speed ~/path/to/rom.zip

VBA-M also comes with a GTK GUI, which can be used by running gvbam.

Default controls are:

 Left          Left Arrow  (0114)
 Right         Right Arrow (0113)
 Up            Up Arrow    (0111)
 Down          Down Arrow  (0112)
 A             Z           (007a)
 B             X           (0078)
 L             A           (0061)
 R             S           (0073)
 Start         ENTER       (000d)
 Select        BACKSPACE   (0008)
 Speed up      SPACE       (0020)
 Capture       F12         (0125)

Issues

There are a couple known issues during installation When trying to run VBA after an install you may get this after typing in gvba.

~$ Failed to open audio: Fragment size must be a power of two
Segmentation fault

VBA has been updated to fix this but if you still get this error it may be fixed by editing /src/vbam/src/common/SoundSDL.cpp and editing the function

    bool SoundSDL::init(long sampleRate)

Editing the audio sample has helped me before. If you feel this is too technical, you should contact the developers at the vba forums because this issue should now be resolved.

If you are getting errors about OpenGL and video output the problem is most likely that the video output choice is wrong. To fix this edit the configuration file. In the directory /home/<USER>/.config/gvbam

In the Display Section of the config file changing the line from

output=1

to

output=2

or

output=0

Has been known to fix the problem.

Also the Directories for which VBA will search for the game saves and ROMs can sometimes revert back to the default setting. If prefer to keep you saves and ROMs in a specific directory you may want to edit the config file in /home/$USER/.config/gvbam You may then set the permissions to read-only to prevent VBA from changing them.Take note that any time you change a setting and save while the cofig file is on read-only it will not save. Putting it to read-only effectively "locks" the file from any annoying changes.

In the Directories section simply enter in your preferred directory like this.

[Directories]
gb_roms=/home/generic/Documents/VBA/ROMs 
gba_roms=/home/generic/Documents/VBA/ROMs 
batteries=/home/generic/.config/gvbam 
saves=/home/generic/Documents/VBA/SAVES 
captures=/home/generic/Documents/VBA 

Also make sure your new config file is saved as "config" and not "config~".