VisualBoyAdvance

VisualBoyAdvance
Original author(s) Julian Henry Hitchcock
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)
Written in C, C++
Operating system Cross-platform
Size 1.4 MB - 1.92 MB
Available in English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Chinese, Spanish, Turkish (v.1.7 and above, for Windows only)
Type Console emulator
License GNU General Public License
Website sourceforge.net/projects/vba/
VisualBoyAdvance-M
Original author(s) Julian Henry Hitchcock
Developer(s) VBA-M Development Team
Stable release
2.1.0[1] / 1 July 2018 (2018-07-01)
Operating system Cross-platform
Type Console emulator
License GNU General Public License
Website vba-m.com

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.

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 "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. There is also a RetroArch/Libretro port of VBA-M's GBA emulation core (without the GB, GBC and SGB cores)[7] as well as a modified version called VBA-Next.[8]

Features

VisualBoyAdvance sports the following features:

In addition, VisualBoyAdvance-M adds the following:

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

In conjunction with the Dolphin GameCube emulator, VBA-M supports linking GameCube and Game Boy Advance titles.[9][10]

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,[11] 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. ↑ https://github.com/visualboyadvance/vbam-libretro
  8. ↑ https://github.com/libretro/vba-next
  9. ↑ "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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