Child Amnesiac
Ever changing
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- Age 25
- Colorado
- Seen Apr 21, 2025
VBA is honestly one of the best emulators I've ever used, in general.
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Please stop recommending VBA. It has not been updated since 2004, and GBA emulation has come a long way since then. As such, it is an inaccurate emulator and games that run fine on hardware may end up glitching on it, and vice versa. Thus, you may have bugs on VBA that you would not have on any other emulator, and chances are quite a few devs will ignore your bug reports if they're aware you're playing on VBA. It also has potential security vulnerabilities, but to be fair I don't know if the average user would ever have to worry about them. You should not be developing your hacks with VBA in mind, and VBA users should strongly consider upgrading if they want to play their favorite hacks.
VBA-M is a fine successor, but outside audio performance the most accurate emulator is mGBA. Whichever emulator you like more is up to you, but if you want your game to run on real hardware and want some semblance of a debugging environment then you should be testing on mGBA as much as possible.
I've tried all of these and I do agree that, performance and graphic-wise, mGBA is the best one out of all three.
The only caveat though, and the reason why I don't use it regularly, is because I (seemingly) can't remap the speed up button. It's so much easier to press space while walking to speed up movement instead of the default assigned Tab. If it had that feature, I'd switch in a heartbeat.
You can change the key for speed up via Tools > Settings > Shortcuts and then under Emulation change the Fast Forward key.