GBA Emulators
GBA emulators are programs that recreate the hardware of the Game Boy Advance, letting you play GBA games on PCs, smartphones, tablets and other devices without the original handheld.
Well known GBA emulators such as mGBA and VisualBoyAdvance-M run the vast majority of games and are easy to set up. Most also offer extras that the original console lacked, such as save states, screen filters, fast-forward and cheat support.
Which one to pick
Known forFaster and more accurate than older GBA emulators, with a debugger, cheats, shaders, rewind and scripting. It also runs on the Switch, 3DS, Wii and PS Vita.
Known forThe maintained continuation of Visual Boy Advance. Quick and easy to set up, with save states, cheats, shaders and link cable emulation.
Known forCycle-accurate emulation: the first public emulator to pass all of the AGS aging cartridge tests. Needs a GBA BIOS, dumped or an open source replacement.
Known forLow-level GBA emulation that passes the AGS aging test, with upscaling shaders, rewind and cheats. Its Game Boy and DS emulation is less complete.
Known forThe first GBA emulator with multiplayer link support on one PC. Closed source freeware with extensive debugging features, and DS emulation too.
Known forCustom graphics that can be dumped, edited and reloaded as a game runs. Its Game Boy Color emulation is more complete than its GBA emulation.
Known forOnce a rival to Visual Boy Advance, and one of the first emulators to link up to four copies for local multiplayer.
Known forA portable GBA emulator that ran well on Pentium-era PCs. Mainly of interest as GBA emulation history.
In short
For most people mGBA is the default choice: fast, accurate and available on Windows, macOS, Linux and homebrew consoles. Visual Boy Advance (VBA-M) is quick and easy to set up and runs the vast majority of games. NanoBoyAdvance and SkyEmu put accuracy first, and SkyEmu also runs on Android, iOS and in a web browser. no$gba is a closed source GBA and DS emulator with extensive debugging tools, and GBE+ is known for custom graphics. RascalBoy Advance and BoycottAdvance are no longer developed and are kept here as an archive.
