If you are a fan of GBA you must know a thing or two about GBA emulators for iOS and other devices. No doubt, Game Boy Advance (GBA) is the most outstanding success by Nintendo. They allow players to enjoy their favorite games from wherever they are. These emulators are designed to excite the Game Boy effect. For this reason, you can play your all-time preferred GBA games not only on your iOS device, but also on your computer.

• Free Gameboy Emulator Download
• Free Gameboy Emulator Download
• Free Gameboy Emulator Download

Game Boy Advance is an upgrade of the Game Boy Color version. The upgraded genre is capable of running advanced games. Also, it has powerful hardware and the quality of color is top-notch. There are several Game Boy Advance emulators available to download.

Is a super fast emulator to run GameBoy Advance games on the broadest range of Android devices, from very low-end phones to modern tablets. It does more than just emulating the full system. Thanks to the save state system, you can save progress at any time and return back to it instantly.

• The handheld device was replaced with Game Boy Color, being named due to the colorful display. Most of you don’t know that the original Game Boy was successor of Game & Watch device. Now you can download any game you like in a form of GBA ROMs, including traditional Tetris, Super Mario and many more within seconds. After that, use an emulator.
• Download Nintendo Game Boy emulators for free and play various Game Boy games on your computer or phone. There are different Game Boy emulators and each of them has its own pros and cons, so be sure to read their descriptions before you decide which one you want to download.

Read Also:Best SNES emulators you should try out

Top 8 GameBoy emulators

The following are the best GBA emulators for iOS that will enable you to play GBA games with ease.

1. No$GBA Emulator

No$GBA also known as No$GBA is among the best Gameboy emulator for iPhone that has cemented its presence due to a rare name. The emulator, however, has more than just a name. It can run Nintendo DS games apart from just being able to run GBA games.

Be it as it may, the DS sector isn’t properly developed and perfected. Above all, the emulator works perfectly with various games. For this reason, it can emulate GBA and DS games. Also, it allows the use of the controller. Finally, players can configure games the way they want.

No doubt, No$GBA is definitely one of the best emulators that cover most emulation with ease. No & GBA emulator cannot run DS games effectively.

Pros

• It has controller support
• It runs NDS and GBA games
• It has great optimization

Cons

• The emulator cannot run all NDS games effectively.

2. mGBA

This emulator is a new generation of Game Boy Advance. The unique thing about mGBA is that it precedes the support for the game more than of what is normally supported. In other words, you get extra features when you play GBA ROMS on the computer.

Some of the extra features are the ability to save the game any time you prefer. It also features the cheat code support. It has patches for the game that do not run well and it’s easy to use. Even though, developers should have worked on some advanced features.

Pros

• It allows the use of cheat codes
• It supports a huge collection of GBA games
• It’s simple to use so, it to set up

Cons

• It doesn’t have advanced features

Read Also: Best torrent apps for iOS

3. VisualBoy Advance

VisualBoy Advance is one of the oldest yet, best GBA emulators you can think of. The available version is more advanced and optimized for different platforms. The original version was characterized by lag on low-end systems.

The modified version of VisualBoy Advance is equipped with features that are not available in the standard handheld console. As a result, this has changed the game experience on this emulator. Players can enjoy games the way they want making it one of the best Game Boy Advance emulators.

Apart from that, the emulator is free. It gets constant updates. It allows GBA games to be played on a PC.

Pros

• It uses cheat codes to add excitement to the game
• It has support control and button remapping
• It can record your gameplay or take screenshots
• With it, you can save the game whenever you want

Cons

• It does not run well on old devices

4. BatGBA

BatGBA is the best GBA emulator for iOS. It focuses on simplicity. It takes a very small space and runs on almost any device. The emulator has been in the market for almost a decade. It allows players to run all commercial and noncommercial GBA games.

Pros

• The emulator is the best to gamers who want simplicity
• It operates every GBA game
• It does not require advanced knowledge

Cons

• It lacks advanced features as in most emulators

5. Higan GBA Emulator

Higan GBA emulator lets you play GBA games on iOS, PC, and more. The emulator is simple in nature. For this reason, it can run on almost every device you install.

Players can control the emulator the way they want due to the ease of use. Apart from that, fans enjoy support for GBA games. The emulator supports several console types, for instance, Game Gear, Sega Master System Super Famicom just to mention but a few.

Read Also:Top Nintendo DS emulators for iOS and Mac

It’s worthwhile to note that the audio is lag in a few games

Pros

• The emulator has an advanced color reproduction
• It’s easy to set up
• It supports most of ROMS to emulate

Cons

• In some games, the sound is a bit laggy

6. GBA.emu

This particular emulator has made it to the list because of the amazing features it has. To start with, GBA.emu is able to run most of the games you may want to play. The emulator is capable to quicksave. Besides, players can cheat with code supports which add fun to the game. Still, you can install BIOS emulation and enjoy the control support.

You can play it from wherever you are. However, to install the emulator, you have to pay $5.

Free Gameboy Emulator Download

Pros

• It uses cheat codes to add fun to the game
• It has support control
• Can play a huge collection of games

Cons

• It’s not free

7. GBA4iOS

GBA4iOS has captured millions of Game Boy players making it one of the best GBA emulators. The emulator comes with exciting features and functions. It occupies small space and it’s easy to install. The user-friendly interface is easier to navigate.

Players can enjoy games of their choice using this game launcher. Still, they can make good use of cheat codes to add fun to the game. Above all, the emulator can run both Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance.

Pros

• It provides Wireless support and Airplay
• It’s compatible with a huge collection of online games
• It supports the use of cheat codes
• The interface is customizable
• It synchronizes data and uses cloud storage to store files

Cons

• The emulator has to be installed manually

It’s compatible with iOS version 8.3.0 or less. Other versions of iOS can run through a paid down from another site.

8. My Boy!

My Boy is one of the popular yet, best Game Boy Advanced emulator. It has extra features that are unique from other emulators. For instance, you can use cable support to run high games and slow down. Also, it features fast forward modes and hardware controller support. All these increase the chances of you enjoying your preferred Game Boy Advanced games.

Pros

• Great computing power
• Excellent customization
• You can play a variety of games
• It consumes less power
• Has a link cable emulation support
• Has a quick save options and support for cheat codes
• Has a controller support

Cons

• No negatives reported

All these emulators are good. Each is unique and some have excelled in the field. Considering the fact that they are the best GBA emulators, whichever you choose will take you back to glory days.

Read Also:Top Android emulators for iOS

Some time ago I created a list of things I wanted to do as a programmer. Creating a minecraft clone, a game engine and a software renderer are some of the items sharing the list with “create an emulator”. After some talks with my good friend Kleverson at the office, he convinced me to make a Gameboy emulator. It’s not as complex as other game consoles from that time, but it’s definitely not trivial.

I got motivated because I saw all the potential subjects I would be exposed while doing this. Learning computer organization in practice, get more familiar with assembly language (not a specific dialect, but whole low-level concept), understand how primitive graphics systems worked, improve my debug techniques, and end up with working project. You can realize by now that I’m selling the idea of creating an emulator, so grab a coffee and let’s do this together.

Repository mygbemu is already live on GitHub and you can check the code here. It’s not even close to be functional, it only runs the bios software so far and I’m currently working to make Tetris run on it. You’ll see more in this project as I write the posts.

Environment and Setting

There are a lot of open-source gameboy emulators on GitHub, written in all languages you can imagine. From Javascript to Kotlin, C++, and so on. I really recommend you reading other project’s codes, that can give you insights on how to do specific things.

I decided to use C because I wanted to get more familiar with it, since I hadn’t coded in C for a long time. It should run on Windows and Linux from the beginning, even though I mostly work on it on Windows with Visual Studio. The only 3rd-party library I’m using is SDL for the graphics, but we don’t need this right now.

The Gameboy

The first version of the gameboy was released in 1989 and was based on a hardware from almost 15 years before. An 8-bit CPU (4MHz) based on the Intel 8080, 8kB RAM and 8kB VRAM. It’s very important to read the Wikipedia entry for the Gameboy and watch this amazing video before continuing this article.

Free Gameboy Emulator Download

Where to start?

That’s the question my programming friends ask me when I say I’m working on an emulator. And I did that myself. You know that an emulator emulates, but emulates what? Every electronic component? What are the components? Do I need to understand the target platform from the physical level?

Well, first we need to understand that “emulation” is not “simulation”. You don’t have to implement things exactly the way they are, no need for wires or electric pulses. Remember the goal is to run a program that was made for that architecture and the results should be pretty much similar, but the way you do does not matter. For instance, the console uses a memory mapping as a bridge to connect the “video card” to the cpu, but you can make a direct call from your cpu module to the video, if the outcome is the same, you’re doing it right.

We have many components we need to emulate, mostly important the Memory, CPU, Video Unit and Sound Unit. This also is the order that we are going to implement. Since everything relies on the memory mapping, that’s what we are going to do first.

Memory Management Unit

First thing we need to know is that since gameboy’s CPU is 8bit, its registers can only hold 8 bits of data at a time. But they can be accessed in pairs, for instance A, F, B, C,H, and L registers can be accessed with the combination AF, BC, and HL. The PC and SP are 16 bit only registers. So we have 16 bit addressable memory, going from 0x0000 to 0xFFFF, that means we have 65,536 positions. However, it’s not all RAM memory or anything. As mentioned previously, gameboy uses the memory as a bridge between CPU and other components. So this memory has regions that access data from the ROM, the cartridge, video memory, sound, etc.

This is an accurate map of the gameboy’s MMU from this page, which I recommend you to visit to gather more information about each area.

Jumping to the code, we can just define our memory management, basically following the areas:

• bios will store the 256 bytes startup code. When the gameboy starts, the MMU will map it in the first 256 bytes of the memory, so that’s why we need the finished_bios flag. And it’s a pointer because it needs to be initialized pointed to position 0xFF50.
• addr is the complete addressable memory, so it’s really easy to write and read from it
• the’re in a union because we can also directly access each fraction of the MMU

Let’s initialize (and destroy) our MMU:

Now we need to write basic read/write functions:

These functions will read and write 8 bit values, but since our CPU can work with 16 bit values, our MMU also needs to be able to read and write these values:

Free Gameboy Emulator Download

Now we can play a little bit with this code. Read and write both 8 and 16 bit values to our MMU.

Let’s also load the bios code:

You can also check the complete assembly for this code here. It’s gonna be very important once we start the CPU.

Can you believe our MMU is basically done? I mean it does almost everything the CPU needs, so we can move on to it. But before, let’s play a little:

You can check the final code at GitHub. It’s a bit different, but that’s because I’m going by steps.

Next time we will be looking at the CPU.