nealmm/nanoboyadvance

A cycle-accurate Nintendo Game Boy Advance emulator.

NanoBoyAdvance

NanoBoyAdvance is a cycle-accurate Game Boy Advance emulator.
It aims to be as accurate as possible, while also offering enhancements such as improved audio quality.

Features

• Very high compatibility and accuracy (see Accuracy)
• HQ audio mixer (for games which use Nintendo's MusicPlayer2000 sound engine)
• Post-processing options (color correction, xBRZ upscaling and LCD ghosting simulation)
• Save State support (10x save slots available)
• Game controller support (buttons and axises can be remapped)
• Loading ROMs from archives (Zip, 7z, Tar and limited RAR¹ support)
• RTC emulation
• Solar Sensor emulation (for example: for Boktai - The Sun is in Your Hand)

Running

Download a recent development build or the last stable release.

Upon loading a ROM for the first time you will be prompted to assign the Game Boy Advance BIOS file.
You can dump it from a real console (accurate) or use an unofficial BIOS (less accurate).

Accuracy

A lot of research and attention to detail has been put into developing this core and making it accurate.

• Cycle-accurate emulation of most components, including: CPU, DMA, timers, PPU and Game Pak prefetch
• Passes all AGS aging cartridge tests (NBA was the first public emulator to achieve this)
• Passes most tests in the mGBA test suite (see mGBA suite comparison for more details)
• Passes ARMWrestler, gba-suite and FuzzARM CPU tests
• Very high compatibility, including games that require emulation of peculiar hardware edge-cases (see Game compatibility)

Compiling

See COMPILING.md in the docs folder.

Credit

• Martin Korth: for GBATEK, a good piece of hardware documentation.
• endrift: for prior research and hardware tests.
• destoer: for contributing research, tests and insightful discussions.
• LadyStarbreeze: for contributing research, tests and insightful discussions.
• Pokefan531 and hunterk: for the default GBA color correction algorithm
• Talarubi and Near: for higan's GBA color correction algorithm
• DeSmuME team and Hyllian: xBRZ upscaling code

Sister Projects

• Panda3DS: A new HLE Nintendo 3DS emulator
• Dust: Nintendo DS emulator for desktop devices and the web
• Kaizen: Experimental work-in-progress low-level N64 emulator
• SkyEmu: A low-level GameBoy, GameBoy Color, GameBoy Advance and Nintendo DS emulator that is designed to be easy to use, cross platform and accurate

Copyright

NanoBoyAdvance is Copyright © 2015 - 2023 fleroviux.
It is licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL) 3.0 or any later version. See LICENSE for details.

Game Boy Advance is a registered trademark of Nintendo Co., Ltd.

Footnotes

1. RAR 5.0 is currently not supported. ↩