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GiiBiiAdvance

Another GB, GBC and GBA cross-platform emulator writen in C. By Antonio Niño Díaz (AntonioND). It's licensed under the GPL v2 license. The source code is available in GitHub.

This is an emulator I started several years ago. I didn't release any version for a few years after 0.1.0. At some point I did some changes that improved compatibility a lot, and ported the original Win32 GUI to SDL2. The objective was to make it as portable as possible. Everything you need to play is in the main window. The debugger needs additiona windows, but that's not needed to play. If your machine doesn't have a windows manager, all the changes that are needed are to disable the debugger.

A few years later I decided to clean up the code and release 0.3.0. It has a lot of improvements of the months after 0.2.0. It also has some bugfixes added during a few years. Finally, the code has been cleaned up and a new build system has been added so that it can finally be built in Windows easily.

This emulator isn't meant to be used for playing. It is perfectly capable of emulating most GB/GBC games pretty accurately, and most GBA games with reasonable accuracy. However, there are several emulators that probably are a better idea than GiiBiiAdvance due to their better support.

However, this is the first emulator that emulated completely the GB Camera (if you have a webcam)! :) More information aobut the GB Camera hardware here.

It's also what I used to implement the PC simulation side of ugba, my GBA library. For example, all the video simulation and BIOS services.

My website: www.skylyrac.net

Build instructions for Linux

This program depends on CMake, SDL2 (at least version 2.0.7), libpng (at least version 1.6) and zlib.

sudo apt install cmake libsdl2-dev libpng-dev

If you want to build the emulator with GB Camera support, you need to install OpenCV 4 as well. If OpenCV is detected during the build process, it will be used. If not, the emulator won't have webcam support.

sudo apt install libopencv-dev

If you want to support Lua scripts, you need to install Lua 5.2 or higher as well. If it is detected during the build process, it will be used. If not, the emulator won't have Lua scripts support. For example:

sudo apt install liblua5.3-dev

In order to build GiiBiiAdvance with the default set of options, type:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make

To build it faster, do a parallel build with:

make -j`nproc`

For a release build:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
make -j`nproc`

Build instructions for Windows (Microsoft Visual Studio)

In order to build with MinGW or Cygwin, you should use the Linux instructions. The following instructions have been tested with Microsoft Visual C++ 2019.

You need to install vcpkg. In short, open a PowerShell window and do:

git clone https://github.com/Microsoft/vcpkg.git
cd vcpkg
.\bootstrap-vcpkg.bat
.\vcpkg integrate install --triplet x64-windows

This program depends on CMake, SDL2, libpng and zlib:

.\vcpkg install SDL2 libpng --triplet x64-windows

If you want to build the emulator with GB Camera support, you need to install OpenCV 4 as well. If OpenCV is detected during the build process, it will be used. If not, the emulator won't have webcam support.

.\vcpkg install opencv4 --triplet x64-windows

If you want to support Lua scripts, you need to install Lua 5.2 or higher as well. If it is detected during the build process, it will be used. If not, the emulator won't have Lua scripts support.

.\vcpkg install liblua --triplet x64-windows

In order to build GiiBiiAdvance with the default set of options, type the following commands in a Visual Studio command line shell (replacing the path to the vcpkg folder by the one in your system):

mkdir build
cd build
cmake .. -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=C:\...\vcpkg\scripts\buildsystems\vcpkg.cmake -DVCPKG_TARGET_TRIPLET=x64-windows
msbuild GiiBiiAdvance.sln

In order to get a Release build, do:

msbuild GiiBiiAdvance.sln /property:Configuration=Release

Instead of running msbuild from the command line, you can also open the solution file with Visual Studio and build it from the IDE.

Planned features:

  • Improve the GUI:
    • Another subwindow to configure MBC7 and emulator controls like speedup.
    • GB Camera and GB Printer viewers. GB Camera: Registers, images (let the user see the thumbnails to choose).
    • GBA I/O hardware viewer (RTC, sensors...).
    • Export images from new debugger windows.
    • Dump dissasembly/memory to a file and restore it?
    • Wav recording.
    • Video recording?
  • Obviously, improve emulation.
    • Implement mosaic correctly (in GBA mode).
    • Correct GBA CPU timings.
    • Rewrite A LOT of GB core to speed up emulation. (In progress)
    • Auto frameskip.
    • Fix broken x86 ASM instructions of GBA emulation in Linux. setc (%%ebx) seems to be the problem...
    • HuC3, MMM01 and TAMA5 mappers for GB.