Visual Boy Advance Tutorial | Video Game Emulation for Newbies

About Visual Boy Advance

This tutorial is to help you with Visual Boy Advance on Windows. It ‘s considered by most people to be the # 1 copycat for Game Boy Advance. It was n’t the first Game Boy Advance copycat, but the first to become democratic. It comes equipped with all the common features we expect emulators to have such as screen filters, cheats, and screen recording. Emulation quality is practically arrant. In summation to Game Boy Advance, Visual Boy Advance besides supports emulating early classical Game Boy systems. Those systems include Game Boy Classic, Super Game Boy, and Game Boy Color.

The original Visual Boy Advance was last update in 2005. fortunately, others have picked up the torch and continued updating it under the name “ VisualBoyAdvance-M ” ( or “ ocular Boy Advance Merged ” ). This tutorial focuses on VisualBoyAdvance-M. There is very little remainder between the original Visual Boy Advance and the Merged translation. Hence, this tutorial can still be used for either version .
*If you would like to download VisualBoyAdvance-M, I have it on my emulators page .

Should you use Visual Boy Advance?

With all the copycat offerings as of 2022, should you use ocular Boy Advance ( or VisualBoyAdvance-M ) ? Well, it depends. mGBA is a predict copycat offering cycle-accurcy. RetroArch, a democratic multi-system copycat, is a great option for bundling GBA emulation with 40+ other television plot systems. These emulators are still in development, unlike Visual Boy Advance which has been abandoned .
ocular Boy Advance hush offers practicality and simplicity. It ‘s easy to use and offers more features than mGBA. If you want a standalone copycat that ‘just works out of the box ‘, Visual Boy Advance is distillery a good option. And make certain not to mistakenly download the classical Visual Boy Advance from 2005 – you should be using VisualBoyAdvance-M .

Installation

ocular Boy Advance is a standalone broadcast so it does not have an install sorcerer. installation is elementary : precisely extract Visual Boy Advance from its nothing file. not sure how to extract zip code files ? here ‘s a video tutorial usher you how : how to unzip files on Windows .
IMPORTANT! Visual Boy Advance must be placed in a common folder on your computer. I recommend Documents, Downloads, or create a folder on your desktop. If you place ocular Boy Advance somewhere else on your main C drive, then you may be restricting it to read-only access. Doing so prevents ocular Boy Advance from saving anything .
To open Visual Boy Advance ( VisualBoyAdvance-M ), double-click on

Setting up the keyboard or gamepad

1. Click on Options > stimulation > place > Config 1, as shown below:
   
2. You’ll arrive at the configuration screen shown below. The keyboard keys in view are the current button configuration.
   
3. To reconfigure a button, click on the white field and press the new keyboard key or gamepad button you want it set to. Repeat the process for all buttons you want to be changed. Click o when you’re done.

Loading a game

note that you can place your games wherever you want. typically, people place them in the lapp folder as Visual Boy Advance .
To load a game :

1. Click on file. Then click on the type of game you want to load:
   1. Open GBA – open a Game Boy Advance ROM.
   2. Open GBC – open a Game Boy Color ROM.
   3. Open GB – open a Game Boy Classic ROM.
2. The “Select ROM” window will pop up. Initially, it’ll show the folder where Visual Boy Advance resides. If you placed your games elsewhere, navigate to that folder. Click on the game you want to play, then click Open – .
3. The game will begin playing immediately.

Q: d3dx9_41.dll is missing?

Upon opening Visual Boy Advance, you might get this error :

The program ca n’t start because d3dx9_41.dll is missing from your computer. Try reinstalling the course of study to fix this problem .

You need to install the full moon DirectX software. You can download it here : DirectX End-User Runtime Web Installer ( 284 KB ). This installer promises to install all the bequest files that decline issues such as this .

Fullscreen

once a game is loaded, you can enter/exit fullscreen by pressing the Esc key .

Screen filters (pixel filters)

screen filters enhance graphics to make them look better than the substantial thing ! You can access this feature of speech by clicking on Options > Pixel Filter > Select Filter Plugin, as shown here :

You ‘ll arrive at. Select one and click OK. Open a game and you will see the screen percolate applied .

GBA color correction

Before & after color correction in Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance
Before & after discolor correction in Castlevania : harmony of noise As we all know, the original Game Boy Advance lacked a backlit filmdom. This made games hard to see. Game developers responded by making colors very bright. While this helps with the real thing, it can be an eyesore when playing games on your computer .
ocular Boy Advance has a feature that attempts to correct these bright colors. You can enable it by going to Options > Gameboy > Gameboy Colors, .

Save states

Save states is a feature that saves the accurate spot you are in any bet on. You can use this sport manually by going into the File menu or by flying keyboard shortcuts .

• Capturing a state: To capture a save state go to file > Save Game and choose any of the 10 slots. These slots are reserved to allow you to save up to 9 different save states. The keyboard shortcut for saving states is Shift+F1 to save in Slot 1.
• Loading a state: To load a state you previously saved, go to file > Load Game. Then choose the slot where your save resides. The keyboard shortcut for loading saves is F1 to load from Slot 1.

*All the RPG shrines in my FantasyAnime.com offer dispatch collections of periodical game saves. With them, you can continue at any significant point in the game. I offer a Game Saves Tutorial where you can learn more about how to use person else ‘s saves. You can besides learn about how to transfer saves between other emulators .

Fast forward

Fast forward is the feature that speeds up the crippled. To access it, go to Options > Speed > Throttle and choose a percentage above 100 % ,. If that ‘s excessively fast, you can select other to enter a custom-made percentage. To bring the game back to normal speed, select No accelerator .

Cheats

ocular Boy Advance lets you cheat using your favored Gameshark or Codebreaker codes. It ‘s comfortable. To put in Gameshark codes :

1. First, go to Cheats > list, as shown below:
   
2. Next, click on the Gameshark button. , fill in the “Description” and “Code” boxes.
3. Click very well when you’re done. Click all right to exit the Cheats window. Now restart the game so the cheats can take effect.

Finding cheats: GameGenie.com is a good site. The following best beginning is Google. The best search keywords to use is to type the name of the game then “ game genie ”. For exemplar : “ super mario world game genie ” .

Capturing screen shots

Simply press the F12 key and Visual Boy Advance will drop a screen shoot into the same directory where your video recording game ROM resides. It will save the screen shot as a PNG image .
You could besides go to File > Screen Capture, but pressing F12 is army for the liberation of rwanda easier .

Capturing sound

1. Go to Tools > commemorate > Start Sound Recording.
2. Choose a filename, then click Save for the recording to begin. Expect Visual Boy Advance to lag a little bit. But rest assured, the sound it’s recording won’t sound choppy like that.
3. When you’re done recording, go to Tools > record > Stop Sound Recording.

To edit your legal file you can use this absolve strait editor program : Audicity. And to convert it to MP3 use WinLAME ( it ‘s 1.50 MB ) .

Capturing movies

1. Go to Tools > criminal record > Start AVI Recording.
2. Choose a filename, then click Save for the recording to begin. Expect Visual Boy Advance to lag a little bit. But rest assured, the movie it’s recording won’t come out choppy like that.
3. When you’re done recording, go to Tools > record > Stop AVI Recording.

ocular Boy Advance uses a quite obscure codec for its AVI recordings that Windows does n’t recognize on its own. So here ‘s what you can do about that :

• You’d need VLC to play these AVI recordings (it’s free).
• If your plan is to upload the AVI recording to YouTube, YouTube will accept it despite its obscure codec. But it’s a different story if you want to edit the recording first.
• If you want to edit the movie, you’d need to convert it to MP4 first with Handbrake (a free video converter). Then you can use a movie editor.

Finding ROMs

In my links page, I have some good links to sites where you can download ROMs. If you want to try to find more sites than what ‘s in my collection of links, just Google around. For exemplar, if you want to download Advance Wars fair Google “ download advance wars gba ” .

Patching ROM hacks

Learn all about patching ROMs with ROM hacks in my Patching Tutorial. note that the best rate to find ROM hacks is Romhacking.net .

Q: I get the error “Saved data is corrupted”

Upon loading a game ( particularly a Pokemon game ) you might get this mistake : “ Saved data is corrupted ”. here ‘s how to resolve this :

1. Delete any SRM or SAV files associated with the game that is giving you this error. For example, if your ROM is called “Pokemon Leaf Green (U).zip” then you’ll see “Pokemon Leaf Green (U).srm” or “Pokemon Leaf Green (U).sav” in the same folder where the ROM resides. Delete them.
2. Click here to download vba-over.ini (1.91 KB)
3. Extract “vba-over.ini” from the zip file you just downloaded and place it in the same directory that Visual Boy Advance resides.
4. Move the ROM of the game you’re trying to play to Visual Boy Advance’s directory.
5. Open Visual Boy Advance (if it’s already open, close it and re-open it). Go to Options > copycat > Save Type and make sure Automatic and Flash 64k are selected; as shown here.
6. Load the game and you should no longer see that error.

Q: Cheat codes aren’t working in Pokemon!

People have reported having a bang-up hand of trouble getting cheats to work specifically with the Pokemon games. If you read the part on using cheats and you ‘re still unable to get cheats to work, check out this article at Flickroom : How to Fix not Working and Glitchy Cheats for Pokemon GBA Games.

Q: VBA isn’t saving anything!

If you ‘re using Visual Boy Advance for the first meter and you ‘re finding that you have all these problems :

1. Save states aren’t working. You save a state, then when you try to reload it nothing happens.
2. In an RPG when you save your game at a save point and close/re-open Visual Boy Advance, you find that the save is lost.
3. Emulator configurations that you changed such as adding a screen filter aren’t saved. When you close/re-open Visual Boy Advance, you have to make those configuration changes again.

then your trouble is that you presently have Visual Boy Advance in a read-only placement on your computer. You must move Visual Boy Advance to a more common localization such as Documents, Downloads, or a folder on your background .