In first words, very big thanks for mGBA! I was asking You some years ago about GBA emulator and i'm happy that finally You made it!

But there are some problems with some games.

Some are graphically turned for about 45 degrees, e.g. Boulder Dash EX or have turned some parts of screen e.g. Bruce Lee: Return of Legend have turned background. Some have sound problems, e.g. both Metroids. Some have other bugs, e.g. Magical Vacation have glow effects not masked and it's big glowing squares instead glowing attacks or glowing during level up.

If You want i can test all my games which i have and give You complete list what's wrong in what games.

I have to ask, did you copy over the original gameboy advance bios to the folder? ;)

That fixed up alot of the bugs in games like Castlevania Harmony of Dissonance. :)

Yes. it helps. Now some (not checked all yet) of these games working ok. I suppose rest should also work without problems.

Sorry for too hurry bugreport, i should check with proper BIOS before nagging.

You are fine. :) I wondered the same thing, but Kelly pointed out that the original bios has to be there.

As Doffo mentioned putting in the original bios files fixes most of the issues with gfx/snd glitches. Pretty cool playing GBA games on MorphOS. Something I wanted for awhile but until mGBA came along there were not many good porting candidates.

Quote:

Yep, thanks again! ;) It is pretty nice. Lots of great games were on the GBA.

I just finished deeper check all games which i have for GBA and all is working fine with BIOS.

But i have one question and found one minor bug.

For GameBoy and GameBoy Color neither screenshots nor snapshots are not available. Also [TAB] is not working. Is planned to add at least sceenshot option and [TAB] wit screenshot option?

And this minor bug is about saves in GameBoy (*.GB). When save file is created, four symbols (.GBA or .GBC) is removed and .sav is added, but in .GB it's still four letter. It means that last letter from filename (not suffix) is also removed. It can cause rare bug, e.g. for both "Game1.GB" and "Game2.GB" same file "Game.sav" may be ceated.

One more bug. When using for a longer time and playing more GBA games program tends to not refresh VRAM. It can ends with full VRAM usage. Of course when quitting mGBA, VRAM is flushed and You can run emulator again.

[ Edited by Solo_Kazuki 03.04.2020 - 17:12 ]

Will look into fixing these issues sometime soon...

OK. I fixed the GB and GBA savestate and screenshot preview support. Also fixed the trimmed filename glitch for sram filenames. If you have an old .gb sram with a trimmed filename you will have to manually rename it adding in the last letter for it to load. I was not able to reproduce the vram issue here it always allocates some vram when the emulation starts and it gets freed again when exited. Maybe try the latest version after a reboot and see how it works.

Download here:
mGBA page

Thanks for adding snapshots and screenshots and fixing save file name problem in GB.

Sadly VRAM draining bug is still present. Today i even had system suspend because of lack of VRAM. Problem with "catch" this bug is that it needs long time, few hours or so.

I just found that problem may be not emulator itself, but... screenshots in GUI.

I just going up and down to chose which game to play and spot that VRAM gauge (i'm using memory panel on upper system bar) is going up while changing games.

NB: Problem is not present in Your other emulators (just checked it to be sure). It looks like mGBA don't flush screensots loaded while checking games.

[ Edited by Solo_Kazuki 13.04.2020 - 15:30 ]

I had a quick look at this and found that it does indeed fill up the main memory slowly but not the vram. Each time you switch games it seems to allocate some more memory somewhere that doesn't get freed until program exit. I am pretty certain this is happening inside the emulator core somewhere so it might be difficult to track this down. Seems to correspond to the size of the rom loaded so I will start looking there. Maybe I will try switching from fixed rom buffer size to dynamic allocation and see if that helps the situation. Will investigate further...

Yes, indeed it's normal RAM. I mistake bars, sorry.

I managed to track down the issue. The rom memory was not being de-allocated properly. I also changed the behaviour a little so the rom and core only get allocated when you start the emulator now. This makes scrolling through your screenshots faster.

Download here: mGBA page

Thanks!

Now it's working ok, and also as You mentioned much faster change screenshots.

Since all basic bugs are out, maybe You can look on this?

Some hacked games (mostly GB games with color hack) have problems with BIOS. It depends what type of game (for GB or GBC) is loaded before and when loading such game it can mess with emulation and next loaded game for GBC have "this game is for GameBoy Color" or similar message. But some normal GB games have modified color palette as on GBC with GB games can be applied.

This is very chaotic about working and if You want to look on this i can share some such hacked games.

[ Edited by Solo_Kazuki 22.04.2020 - 17:34 ]