Visual Boy Advance is widely considered one of the best GBA emulators available. The ones we list in the remainder of this guide are only the best of the best GBA emulators for you to choose from. Some of them are free, some are not, some have extra options, and some are more stable than others. As such, there is a variety of them out there already. The Best GBA Emulatorsīecause emulators are nothing more than programs, it’s entirely possible to create them yourself. While there’s not a lot of protocol in place for emulators, as they’re mainly used to play games that are difficult to find or not sold anymore, using emulators to play more recent games is a bit more questionable (and a lot more difficult). Whichever path you decide to take, be careful during your adventures.

While this is still a bit of a grey area, it’s not quite piracy either – as long as you don’t share them. While we can’t necessarily condone this act, you can always purchase old GBA games and turn them into ROMs yourself. Since you’re receiving an image of the game itself, it’s the same as downloading music or videos for free online. While emulators are not inherently wrong, and you can even create them yourself, downloading ROMs from the internet or receiving them from others is technically piracy. Unfortunately, this is where the questionable nature of emulators comes into play. Essentially, a ROM is like a “picture” of the game that you would play on your emulator, and the emulator reads and interprets that picture to run the game. Additionally, when we say ROM, we’re actually leaving out the second half: the full term is ROM file or ROM image. The word ROM stands for Read-Only Memory. However, there is one more essential step: collecting your ROMs. You just need to navigate to the game that you want to play, and it should boot up automatically, as the emulator program is more or less self-contained. While some might consider these quality-of-life improvements to be closer to cheating, you can’t deny that they make your life a bit easier.

For example, some GBA emulators have integrated cheat code functionality, extra save slots and double-speed functions that let you skip through long stories, credits, or dialogue.

As such, a GBA emulator recreates the software and coding of a GBA emulator on a more current system, such as a PC or smartphone.Įmulators are great because many of them add features that were not available to the original device. Essentially, an emulator is what you get when an entire program is recreated within another program. If you’ve never heard of the emulator before, we have some life-changing news for you.

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