Emulators are software

do you just memorize your rom names and type them in dmenu? Curious about this setup

There's three states an emulator can be.
Imperfect, "GoodXperfect" and actually perfect.
Imperfect is like project 64, where there are commercial games that just don't fucking work well.
"GoodX perfect" means that the emulator author got every single commercial rom available on the goodx database for the system and made em all work.
This is where most modern 2D console emulators are, including GB/GBA.

But if you gonna develop software for the system using the emulator, "goodx perfect" won't be enough, because while the emulator emulate the system perfectly from the commercial games point of view, it is not a perfect copy of the system by any means, and will allow your program to do things that are not possible on the real hardware or vice versa.
And example that i encountered is on the blueMSX emulator.
This emulator runs ALL the MSX roms and disk images, but it allows you to read and write data to the disk while the drive is not spinning, and also allows you to update the sprite table on the middle of the screen.
Those two things are impossible to do on the real hardware, but as no software attempts to do that, the author didn't bothered.

I think that's a oversimplification

its not as simple as running every thing or not

it can run every thing but still have bugs in it and crashes. no one has fully played thru every game on every emulator to make sure it works.

still if you think the gba and gb are emulated well enough to be 100% usable I might hold off on the sp but im sure there is a situation where a sp would be better. I don't care about modifying the game mid playthru if I want to mod the game or add cheats I can do that and then load it onto the r4 card or what ever im using in the SP.

I like to go through my backlog in batches of 5's.
so I just get the ones I want and put them in a dmenu script and set that to a keybind in dwm.
sadly I haven't played anything since last may, been too busy.
dmenu is useful for a ton shit by the way

Attached: dwm_dual.jpg (2880x1024, 1.02M)

does any one know how well 3DS emulation is going?

as far as I can tell PSP emulation is maybe approaching 100%? with just some slight visual errors?

thanks mate

The big emulators count with the power of the masses to pull that "play every game" thing.

this is the main reason to emulate any thing

youtube.com/watch?v=v3_WiNow_gE

stupid first party games that will never get released on any thing els.

still doubt every gb and gba game has been played thru.

we are talking about like 5000 games at maybe 10hours each

there isn't enough people to do that that's like 2000 days of work.

I know there's ROMs made specifically for testing emulation features for the original Game Boy (Color) at least. Maybe something like that exists for the GBA too. No need to test every game if you already know that every feature of the original hardware is supported and working fine.

There are a lot more than 2000 people playing games on the gameboy, and while most will just play the more popular shit, some will eventually play an obscure one end to end.

GBA emulation is very good, but it's not perfect. mGBA is the most accurate, but some games have graphical or audio glitches and a few don't boot. VBA-M is also pretty good, but slower and a bit less accurate.

See: emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/Game_Boy_Advance_emulators

Higan (bgba) aims at cycle accuracy, but it's currently less compatible than mGBA and it's slow as balls. I don't think any of these emulators can play the full GBA library, but they're pretty close.

That said, I don't want to deter you from buying a GBA. It's a cute console and I think it's nice to play handheld games on a handheld. I just bought a GBA EverDrive for my childhood GBA and I'm keen to start using it again. You could also buy a 3DS. If you softmod it, you can run GBA games from the SD card on a real (virtualised) GBA, since the 3DS contains real GBA hardware.

What device do you use for audio? I've tried `-device usb-audio' but it doesn't work well at all.

Also, the graphics adapter qemu emulates doesn't seem to support low-colour video modes, so software that want those either won't work right or will refuse to run. SimCity 2000 is one of the latter, for example.

Something like
Is /path/to/roms | dmenu -i "$@" | xargs -I '{}' mednafen '/path/to/roms/{}'