Table of Contents

Game Boy Advance

Personality

Audio

Visual

Due to adaptions related to visability problems GBA games' graphics tend to look a bit pale and washed out when emulated.

3-D

Though not built for the purpose the GBA doesn't do too bad a job rendering polygons, better than the SNES anyway, which it often compared to in regards to hardware potential (for no great reason, really, apart from some library crossover).

Polygonal

Here's a list of games which use polygons in some way:

Voxels

And here's a list for engines, tech demos, homebrew, etc.

Semi-3D

Game which use a variety of techniques to appear 3-D, appearing similar to raycasting.

Design

Library

Periphera

Flash Carts

EZ-Flash IV

Some advice for EZ-Flash IV users.

  1. Get Mini SD card. Not a Micro in a adapter, a Mini one. Also, no SDHC so you're limited to 2 GB (which is more then enough really). Ok, you can actually use Micro with an adapter but just know that whenever the cart starts throwing error messages at you (which to be fair took me like 2 years of usage before it happened) the first thing to try is switch to a new Micro-Mini SD adapter (and of course trying to find one that is not a cheap Chinese knock-off which may be harder then you think these days)
  2. Reset patching. The official client allows you to patch games with this which allows you to boot back to the game select menu with a shortcut key. Very useful convenient especially considering how you should do this whenever you finish a game to let your save write to the SD card. However, if a game acts up for any reason the first thing to do is to try again without the reset patching it since it is likely what's causing it. Link cable multiplayer seems to be most fucked by it. It's rare enough though that you can just leave it on by default.
    The default reset key combination sucks though (found myself accidentally hitting it when playing Metroid). Would recommend changing it to L+R+Start+Select
  3. Make sure the ROM names aren't too long. You will be unable to save if they are. “Super Mario Advance 4 - Super Mario Bros 3” being the most common example of names that you just gotta shorten a bit. Say to “Super Mario Adv. 4 - SMB3”. There doesn't seem to be an exact limit here. Some names are simply just too long.
  4. Whenever you start a new game always try to save as quickly as possible, turn off the device completely and attempt to load your save again. There hasn't been one game that hasn't had a solution to it's saving issues that I've encountered but it sucks to discover that you need a fix after losing 1 hour of progress.
  5. Sleep mode will mostly not just work. There are patches for the most popular games here:
    http://ezflash.sosuke.com/wiki/index.php?title=GBA_sleep_mode (I think the Mother 3 translation patch actually includes the fix for some reason)
  6. To get emulators to save properly on the EzFIV you will need specific versions of them. You can find these on the forum.
  7. Dragon Ball Z - Legacy of Goku 2 requires you to use a cracked ROM to bypass the piracy check. It's the only game I've encounter which doesn't seem to have a patch that fixes it. Most others you will find here:
    http://www.pocketheaven.com/ph/bubbz/?system=gba&section=patch (you don't actually need all these patches but if a game that has one doesn't work somehow then try one and see what happens)

Emulation

See also