NanoBoyAdvance

NanoBoyAdvance is a highly accurate Game Boy Advance emulator.
It aims for cycle-accurate emulation when 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 attention to detail has been put into developing this core and making it accurate. Its CPU and timing emulation is more accurate than other software emulators right now.

• Cycle-accurate emulation of the CPU, DMA, timers and Game Pak prefetch buffer
• 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
• High compatibility, including games that require emulation of peculiar hardware edge-cases (see Game compatibility)

Cycle-accurate PPU emulation is an active topic of research and will be implemented, once the timing has been understood and documented well enough.

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

Copyright

NanoBoyAdvance is Copyright © 2015 - 2022 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. ↩