GBA DS 1.5 gives 51 Game Boy Advance games a live second screen on dual-screen handhelds

The mGBA-based emulator for the Anbernic RG DS Plus and other two-screen devices keeps maps, HUDs and status pages on the second screen. Version 1.5 adds eight games, custom bezels, romhack support...

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What if the Game Boy Advance had a second screen? That is the question behind GBA DS, an emulator built for dual-screen handhelds such as the Anbernic RG DS Plus. The game plays on one screen, and the other shows something useful from the game itself, kept current as you play, the way the DS Castlevania games keep their map up. Version 1.5, released on 11 November, supports 51 games. In a post announcing it, the developer says the version they showed a month earlier supported seven.

How it gets the map without pausing you

GBA DS runs on libmgba, the core of the mGBA emulator, and it runs a second, silent copy of the game beside yours. About once a second, and after every room change, it copies your game's state into that copy, presses the map button there, waits for the map screen to settle and records a few frames so the blinking player marker still moves. It then checks the result against a memory flag and fixed pixels of the map screen before showing it, so title screens, cutscenes and fades never land on the second screen. Your own game is never paused or touched.

Games without a map get other things. Mario Kart: Super Circuit is drawn twice each frame, once without the HUD and once with only the HUD, so the race fills the top screen and the laps, times and a course map twice the size sit below. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 keeps the goal sheet up while you skate. Any other GBA game still runs; it just uses one screen.

What 1.5 adds

The eight new games are V-Rally 3, Dragon Ball Z: The Legacy of Goku II, Dragon Ball Z: Buu's Fury, Ninja Five-O, Muppet Pinball Mayhem, GT Advance 3: Pro Concept Racing, Eragon and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. The racers move their HUD and course map down; the Dragon Ball games show the Scouter's map of the area; Muppet Pinball Mayhem goes further and runs two more copies of the game so the whole table plays live across both screens as one tall table. The release also adds bezels the emulator draws itself, in colours you choose, changeable hotkeys, and support for romhacks and patches, with a note under each game's logo when it recognises a romhack or finds a ROM it does not know.

There is now a browser version in beta, linked from the project page, which plays a GBA game with its second screen on a computer, tablet or phone, with nothing to install. Your games and saves stay on your device. On handhelds, GBA DS installs as a port on ROCKNIX and BananaOS, experimentally on the RG DS Plus's own Linux system, and as an Android app on GammaOS. It does not come with games; you supply your own ROMs.

The project is GPL-3.0 licensed. Its developer says Claude is used in its development, with a lot of manual review and testing, and the README carries an AI disclosure. Each supported game and what its second screen shows is listed in the project's wiki.

Sources

Image: Image: GBA DS