I'm going to post updates and progress about my Game Boy Advance emulator for s&box in this thread for the meantime as a sort of pseudo-blog, feel free to ask any questions about the project here!

Since the video demo, I've went ahead and fixed a lot of glaring bugs and issues present in many games which I will show here.

In Pokémon FireRed and LeafGreen, Professor Oak and the player's sprite literally never showed up in the intro cutscene. That's been fixed:

Mario Kart: Super Circuit has been vastly improved, everything in-game was a horribly garbled assortment of graphical bugs because of a broken decompression algorithm. I've now fixed that plus the game speeding up at the intro and cup selection:

The same bug also affected other games as well including the copyright screen for Pokémon FireRed and LeafGreen and also DOOM II for some reason.

Lastly, both Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Red Rescue Team and Pokémon FireRed and LeafGreen had a bug with the audio in memory being overwritten that caused instruments playing flat in some songs which never happened in the original hardware. This has been fixed.

There's many more bugs still present in other games, but it's beginning to look a lot more polished. I'll continue working on this neat little side-project in the meantime.

sick

Project is now open-source, feel free to clone the repository and/or contribute! I'm planning to build a frontend to make it more friendly for players who aren't as tech-savvy, so I won't be abandoning this anytime soon.

And yes, I changed the name to sGBA. Feel free to come up with a better one (and a logo :V)

GitHub

GitHub - Asphaltian/sgba: Game Boy Advance emulator for s&box

Game Boy Advance emulator for s&box. Contribute to Asphaltian/sgba development by creating an account on GitHub.

Simple demo for saving/loading save states, plus prototyping a custom pause menu for both gamepads and mouse + keyboard setups. Eventually you'll be able to upload and share these save states with others to the Steam Workshop in the future menu hub :D

Would be cool to see this inside of other games 

I think it'd be quite easy to make a Sandbox entity that does the same thing, though I'd rather wait until it's more polished

Moved over everything to a hardware renderer with shaders and got rid of the software renderer, performance should be marginally improved and I've also added a high-resolution scaling feature that mGBA also has! You can see the difference with the sprite at the top-left corner of both images taken in Pokémon Emerald.

Mario Kart: Super Circuit also looks much better, the horizon is noticeably more detailed and doesn't look like its smushed into tiny pixels compared to the original renderer.

Testing out gyro and haptics, only a few game cartridges along with WarioWare Twisted! supported them but I thought it was a little neat to implement nonetheless.

this is epic man

Thanks lad, I'm also looking for anyone to help out so please take note

Back from a hiatus, sorry for not posting in a while :P

Anyways, I'm currently fixing more bugs with the emulator. One of these was in Yoshi's Island: Super Mario Advance 3 whereby after selecting a file, the intro's background just wouldn't load at all along with the dialog prompt at the start. Yoshi also falls off into the dark void and soft-locked the game which was pretty hilarious.

Turns out it was just me implementing the HLE BIOS wrong, whoops! This has been fixed.

Posted a new video about the emulator here, check it out if you wanna see how far it's come since the previous demo!

Did a prototype for the frontend as a part of preparations for it being published to sbox.game, will improve down the road hopefully!

I've released sGBA as a work-in-progress on the Workshop. Remember to report any bugs or suggestions on the GitHub below or the forums. Check it out here!

GitHub

GitHub - Asphaltian/sgba: Game Boy Advance emulator for s&box

Game Boy Advance emulator for s&box. Contribute to Asphaltian/sgba development by creating an account on GitHub.

Made it a little nicer, though I'd still prefer if I got someone to do this for me :P

can you add sega arcade gallery or you can just add your roms?

It works like any other emulator, you'll have to provide them yourself. 

Working on some post-processing shaders right now. Here's colour correction, motion blur and LCD as God intended :D

Published the very first update to sGBA!
https://sbox.game/asphaltian/sgba/news/sgba-update-d5e0715f

Oh and if anyone wants a video demonstration, here's a short clip of sGBA running Beyond the Pixels which is pretty sexy if you ask me

Over the past couple of days, I was experimenting with how I could emulate the Link Cable and how that'd work over s&box's networking system. Turns out doing it over the net is really, really hard because most games expect sub-milisecond latency... should've done my research :P 

So after learning my lesson, I scrapped it and went ahead with the much simpler Wireless Adapter and... voila! I'm actually really surprised this was possible, but I'm going to clean it up before I push this to sGBA for everyone to try out.

I was hoping for this feature! ❤ Would love to see it live! Great work you're doing 👑

Good timing, I just published a new version. I'm looking for people to test it out now!

this is pretty cool.

just doing this for fun or do you plan to expand to make something similar to RetroArch?

Wow, what a dope project this is

I'm starting small right now, but seeing this evolve into a big tent project like RetroArch would be awesome. I also prototyped a DS emulator for a bit when I was working on the frontend. Being the sole developer right now however is pretty time-consuming, so it's going to take a while laying the groundwork for it.

For the link cable you might be able to make it work if its possible to "pause" the emulator until it receives the message. 

I don't know how the NSO app does it but link play over the internet does somehow exist, never tried it though so I have no idea whether it's any good. I'll maybe return to it later though or when someone else can help on that front

i think most get around link cable stuff with emulators by basically turning on a server or a local host server then connecting to a local or multiplayer instance for it, i mean its basically how trading works in newer pokemon games you just need a open internet connection to trade pokemon off.

since S&Box has the network there to make multiplayer easier, there might be like a super simple/easy way to actually route this through S&Box.

Edit: after thinking about it S&box might be the right platform for this type of emulator to revive old games with friends, could even potentially add a random server option where if other people are playing you can just be dumped in with them or if you want to play/trade with someone specifically you could add like a code prompt to specifically connect with that person or could even make like a lobby system where people can say which game their on and do it that way.

theres lots of ways to potentially do it, only a few solutions will be actually good/correct/feel great.

and as long as the emulator never supplies the games and just acts as a hub/way to load them, then theres no risk of legal issues either.

Recovered from a bad fever yesterday, I'll have a ponder about this for the meanwhile...

I think I watched a YouTube video of a guy doing this for Tetris on the original Game Boy and this sounds very familiar.

s&box does have dedicated servers but I'll have to pay upkeep for that and there's no Linux binaries (yet). I can always just use an externally hosted web server with WebSockets though since there's already a good API for it, probably makes a lot more sense too

The party system in s&box recently got some love, I'm going to revisit that once I feel a little better. I do think Nintendo's approach with their emulators is pretty good UX-wise.