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PyBoy Advance is a Game Boy Advance emulator written in Python.

There are already plenty of fantastic GBA emulators out in the wild, most written in languages far better suited than Python for emulator development. This project is not meant to compete with those emulators nor match their capabilities. In fact, PyBoy Advance is rather crap (and slow!) by comparison. I work on this project purely for fun, with my end goal being to offer a highly readable implementation of a GBA emulator for educational purposes.

Warning

This is experimental software and under heavy development. Some GBA hardware features are not yet implemented and many games do not function properly.

Getting started

PyBoy Advance is written in pure Python and technically can be run with the standard CPython interpreter, but performance will be unacceptably slow. Instead, you will need to run PyBoy Advance with PyPy, a fast implementation of Python (see Downloading and Installing PyPy).

Install PyBoy Advance with pip:

$ pypy -m pip install pyboy-advance

You will need to provide a Game Boy Advance BIOS. Normatt's open source BIOS is supported and available here.

Launch PyBoy Advance from the terminal:

$ pyboy_advance --bios /path/to/bios.bin game_rom.gba

Or import and use it in your Python scripts:

from pyboy_advance import PyBoyAdvance

emulator = PyBoyAdvance(rom="game_rom.gba", bios="/path/to/bios.bin")
emulator.run()

Screenshots

Acknowledgements

• GBATEK by Martin Korth, the king of GBA hardware documentation
• ARM7TDMI Technical Reference Manual
• CowBite Virtual Hardware Specifications by Tom Happ
• Tonc by Jasper Vijn
• Excellent reference GBA emulators:
  • mGBA by Vicki Pfau (endrift)
  • NanoBoyAdvance by Fleroviux
  • Hades by Arignir
  • RustBoyAdvance-NG by Michel Heily
• GBA Tests by Julian Smolka
• PyBoy by Mads Ynddal (Baekalfen), a sister project (Game Boy emulator written in Python)