VisualBoyAdvance (commonly abbreviated as VBA) is a free

emulator In computing, an emulator is hardware or software that enables one computer system (called the ''host'') to behave like another computer system (called the ''guest''). An emulator typically enables the host system to run software or use pe ...

of the

Game Boy The is an 8-bit fourth generation handheld game console developed and manufactured by Nintendo. It was first released in Japan on April 21, 1989, in North America later the same year, and in Europe in late 1990. It was designed by the same t ...

Game Boy Color The (commonly abbreviated as GBC) is a handheld game console, manufactured by Nintendo, which was released in Japan on October 21, 1998 and to international markets that November. It is the successor to the Game Boy and is part of the Game ...

, and

Game Boy Advance The (GBA) is a 32-bit handheld game console developed, manufactured and marketed by Nintendo as the successor to the Game Boy Color. It was released in Japan on March 21, 2001, in North America on June 11, 2001, in the PAL region on June 22, ...

handheld game console A handheld game console, or simply handheld console, is a small, portable self-contained video game console with a built-in screen, game controls and speakers. Handheld game consoles are smaller than home video game consoles and contain the co ...

s as well as of Super Game Boy and

Super Game Boy 2 The is a peripheral that allows Game Boy cartridges to be played on a Super Nintendo Entertainment System console. Released in June 1994, it retailed for $59.99 in the United States and £49.99 in the United Kingdom. In South Korea, it is calle ...

. Besides the

DirectX Microsoft DirectX is a collection of application programming interfaces (APIs) for handling tasks related to multimedia, especially game programming and video, on Microsoft platforms. Originally, the names of these APIs all began with "Direct" ...

version for the Windows platform, there is also one that is based on the free

platform independent In computing, cross-platform software (also called multi-platform software, platform-agnostic software, or platform-independent software) is computer software that is designed to work in several computing platforms. Some cross-platform software ...

graphics library A graphics library is a program library designed to aid in rendering computer graphics to a monitor. This typically involves providing optimized versions of functions that handle common rendering tasks. This can be done purely in software and runn ...

SDL. This is available for a variety of operating systems including

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, whi ...

, BSD,

Mac OS X macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lap ...

, and

BeOS BeOS is an operating system for personal computers first developed by Be Inc. in 1990. It was first written to run on BeBox hardware. BeOS was positioned as a multimedia platform that could be used by a substantial population of desktop users an ...

. VisualBoyAdvance has also been ported to

AmigaOS 4 AmigaOS 4 (abbreviated as OS4 or AOS4) is a line of Amiga operating systems which runs on PowerPC microprocessors. It is mainly based on AmigaOS 3.1 source code developed by Commodore, and partially on version 3.9 developed by Haage & Partne ...

AROS Aros may refer to: *Aros (Middle-earth), a river in J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth legendarium * Aros, Mull, the location of Aros Castle, a ruined 13th-century castle on the Isle of Mull, Scotland *AROS Research Operating System, a free software i ...

GameCube The is a home video game console developed and released by Nintendo in Japan on September 14, 2001, in North America on November 18, 2001, and in PAL territories in 2002. It is the successor to the Nintendo 64 (1996), and predecessor of the ...

Wii The Wii ( ) is a home video game console developed and marketed by Nintendo. It was released on November 19, 2006, in North America and in December 2006 for most other regions of the world. It is Nintendo's fifth major home game console, ...

webOS webOS, also known as LG webOS and previously known as Open webOS, HP webOS and Palm webOS, is a Linux kernel-based multitasking operating system for smart devices such as smart TVs that has also been used as a mobile operating system. Initially ...

, and

Zune HD The Zune HD is a portable media player in the Zune product family released on September 15, 2009, by Microsoft. It was a direct competitor with Apple's iPod Touch series of mobile devices. It was initially released in 16 and 32 GB capacities. A ...

History

The VisualBoyAdvance project was started by a developer under the online alias "Forgotten". When this person left the development of the emulator, the project was handed over to a team named "VBA Team", led by Forgotten's brother. Development on the original VisualBoyAdvance stopped in 2004 with version 1.8.0 beta 3, and a number of forked versions were made by various developers in the years since then, such as VisualBoyAdvance-M. VBA was a crucial component of

Twitch Plays Pokémon Twitch Plays ''Pokémon'' (TPP) is a social experiment and channel on the video game live streaming website Twitch, consisting of a crowdsourced attempt to play Game Freak's and Nintendo's ''Pokémon'' video games by parsing commands sent by u ...

, a social experiment in which thousands of button inputs collected from the viewership of the streaming website

Twitch Twitch may refer to: Biology * Muscle contraction ** Convulsion, rapid and repeated muscle contraction and relaxation ** Fasciculation, a small, local, involuntary muscle contraction ** Myoclonic twitch, a jerk usually caused by sudden muscle co ...

were fed into an emulated version of

Pokémon Red (an abbreviation for in Japan) is a Japanese media franchise managed by The Pokémon Company, founded by Nintendo, Game Freak, and Creatures (company), Creatures, the owners of the trademark and copyright of the franchise. In terms of ...

. Viewers typed commands into the chat function, which was then fed into the VBA emulator via an

IRC bot 409px, An IRC bot performing a simple task.An IRC bot is a set of scripts or an independent program that connects to Internet Relay Chat as a client, and so appears to other IRC users as another user. An IRC bot differs from a regular client in th ...

. They succeeded after 16 days of continuous play, with a peak concurrent viewership of 121,000 and over 1.1 million unique participants.

VisualBoyAdvance-M

VisualBoyAdvance-M, or simply VBA-M, is an improved

fork In cutlery or kitchenware, a fork (from la, furca 'pitchfork') is a utensil, now usually made of metal, whose long handle terminates in a head that branches into several narrow and often slightly curved tine (structural), tines with which one ...

from the inactive VisualBoyAdvance project, adding several features as well as maintaining an up-to-date codebase. After VisualBoyAdvance became inactive in 2004, several forks began to appear such as VBALink, which allowed users to emulate the linking of two Game Boy devices. Eventually, VBA-M was created, which merged several of the forks into one codebase. Thus, the ''M'' in VBA-M stands for ''Merge''. VBA-M is

backwards compatible Backward or Backwards is a relative direction. Backwards or Sdrawkcab (the word "backwards" with its letters reversed) may also refer to: * "Backwards" (''Red Dwarf''), episode of sci-fi TV sitcom ''Red Dwarf'' ** ''Backwards'' (novel), a nov ...

with

and

. VBA-M's GBA emulation core was ported into

RetroArch RetroArch is a free and open-source, cross-platform frontend for emulators, game engines, video games, media players and other applications. It is the reference implementation of the libretro API, designed to be fast, lightweight, portable and ...

/ Libretro, without the GB, GBC and SGB cores. as well as a modified version called VBA-Next. VBA-GX is a port of VBA-M to

Nintendo Wii The Wii ( ) is a home video game console developed and marketed by Nintendo. It was released on November 19, 2006, in North America and in December 2006 for most other regions of the world. It is Nintendo's fifth major home game console, f ...

. It enables

motion controls In video games and entertainment systems, a motion controller is a type of game controller that uses accelerometers or other sensors to Motion capture, track motion and provide input. History Motion controllers using accelerometers are used as c ...

for emulated Game Boy Advance games.

Reception

The VisualBoyAdvance became the most popular GBA emulator for the Unix platform and the emulator contributed "greatly" to the late years of GBA game development by providing a suite of development and visual debugging tools for developers who wanted to create games that surpassed even Nintendo's own. A port from VBA's code was used as the foundation of the Visual Boy Zune, an emulator of the

. Wesley Akkerman from the Dutch computer magazine ''

Computer!Totaal ''Computer!Totaal'', conveniently abbreviated as ''C!T'', is a Dutch monthly magazine about computers and related subjects. It is the largest computer magazine of the Netherlands. History and profile Originally, ''C!T'' was the newsletter of the ...

'' named the VisualBoyAdvance as one of the best Game Boy emulators alongside the mGBA, owing to its variety of features and customization options. In a review on the tech blog ''Techilife'' the VisualBoyAdvance has been named the oldest and most reliable Gameboy Advance emulator and has been praised for its ease of use.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Visualboyadvance Amiga emulation software AmigaOS 4 software BeOS software Free video game console emulators Game Boy Advance emulators Game Boy emulators Linux emulation software MacOS emulation software Multi-emulators Portable software Windows emulation software

History

VisualBoyAdvance-M

Reception

See also

References

External links