VisualBoyAdvance

VisualBoyAdvance (commonly abbreviated as VBA) is a free emulator of the Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance handheld game consoles[2] as well as of Super Game Boy and Super Game Boy 2.

VisualBoyAdvance
Original author(s)Julian Henry Hitchcock & Michael Henry Watford
Developer(s)VBA Team
Stable release
1.7.2 (Windows)
1.7.1 (Linux, BeOS)
1.7.4 (Mac) / May 25, 2004 (2004-05-25)
Preview release
1.8.0 beta 3 / October 1, 2005 (2005-10-01)
Repositorysourceforge.net/projects/vba/
Written inC, C++
Operating systemCross-platform
Size1.4 MB - 1.92 MB
Available inEnglish, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Chinese, Spanish, Turkish (v.1.7 and above, for Windows only)
TypeConsole emulator
LicenseGNU General Public License
Websitesourceforge.net/projects/vba 
VisualBoyAdvance-M
Original author(s)Julian Henry Hitchcock & Michael Henry Watford
Developer(s)VBA-M Development Team
Stable release
2.1.4[1] / 17 April 2019 (2019-04-17)
Repositoryhttps://github.com/visualboyadvance-m/visualboyadvance-m
Operating systemCross-platform
TypeConsole emulator
LicenseGNU General Public License
Websitevba-m.com

Besides the DirectX version for the Windows platform, there is also one that is based on the free platform independent graphics library SDL. This is available for a variety of operating systems including Linux,[3] BSD, Mac OS X,[4] and BeOS. VisualBoyAdvance has also been ported to AmigaOS 4, AROS, GameCube, Wii, webOS, and Zune HD.[5]

History

The VisualBoyAdvance project was started by a developer under the online alias "Forgotten".[6] When this person left the development of the emulator, the project was handed over to a team named "VBA Team", led by Forgotten's brother. Development on the original VisualBoyAdvance stopped in 2004 with version 1.8.0 beta 3, and a number of forked versions were made by various developers in the years since then, such as VisualBoyAdvance-M.

VisualBoyAdvance-M

VisualBoyAdvance-M, or simply VBA-M, is an improved fork from the inactive VisualBoyAdvance project, adding several features as well as maintaining an up-to-date codebase. After VisualBoyAdvance became inactive in 2004, several forks began to appear such as VBALink, which allowed users to emulate the linking of two Game Boy devices. Eventually, VBA-M was created, which merged several of the forks into one codebase. Thus, the M in VBA-M stands for Merge.[7] There is also a RetroArch/Libretro port of VBA-M's GBA emulation core (without the GB, GBC and SGB cores)[8] as well as a modified version called VBA-Next.[9]

Features

VisualBoyAdvance sports the following features:

In addition, VisualBoyAdvance-M adds the following:

  • HQ3x/4x pixel filters
  • Game Boy linking, over LAN and Internet

In conjunction with the Dolphin GameCube emulator, VBA-M supports linking GameCube and Game Boy Advance titles.[10][11]

Critical security flaw

The VBA emulator is vulnerable to arbitrary code execution through a feature that allows importation of cheat codes from files, which isn't protected against buffer overrun. By importing a malicious XPC file (usually containing a list of GameShark cheat codes), VBA and VBA-rr can execute arbitrary code contained within the file.

Proof-of-concept XPC files have been written for VBA 1.8.0 and VBA-rr,[12] but VBA-M is currently not known to be vulnerable.

See also

References
  1. Github - Latest Release
  2. "Visual Boy Advance". The Emulator Zone.
  3. i"VisualBoyAdvance-SDL". The Linux Game Tome.
  4. "VisualBoyAdvance 1.7.2". Softonic.
  5. "Visual Boy Advance GX". Google Code.
  6. "Visual Boy Advance". NGEmu. Archived from the original on 2009-12-17. Retrieved 2009-11-18.
  7. "VBA-M (Archived - Now on Github)". SourceForge. Retrieved 2020-10-18.
  8. https://github.com/visualboyadvance/vbam-libretro
  9. https://github.com/libretro/vba-next
  10. "VBA 1.8.0 & VBA-RR: Stack buffer overflow in XPC file parser results in code execution". TheZZAZZGlitch. 12 September 2016.
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