NO$GBA (short for NoCash Game Boy Advance) is a Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS emulator for Microsoft Windows and MS-DOS with a specific focus on Nintendo DSi feature emulation. It also supports emulation of the Nintendo DS Wi-Fi, and initial support has been added for some Nintendo 3DS features. Because the PocketStation runs on an ARM processor, NO$GBA supports it, although this project may move to the NO$PSX emulator. NO$GBA also supports Nintendo e-Reader Dotcodes.
NO$GBA's sister project, NO$GMB, supports Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Pocket and Super Game Boy video games.
History[ | ]
As a Game Boy Advance Emulator[ | ]
The first public release was version 1.0 on March 13, 2002, and it started out as a Game Boy Advance emulator giving limited support for homebrew and commercial ROMs. The last functional version released purely as a Game Boy Advance emulator was 2.0g, released on March 25, 2005.
As a Nintendo DS Emulator[ | ]
Martin Korth started working on Nintendo DS support in version 2.1, released on May 17, 2005, even though the emulator could not yet play homebrew nor commercial ROMs. It wasn't until January 22, 2006, when version 2.2 was released, arriving with it both homebrew and commercial ROM support. Support was still in the development stages, and some ROMs ran at a very low frame rate with a lot of graphical glitches; most of them would not run at all.
Version 2.3 was released on August 4, 2006, containing almost full Nintendo DS emulation support, including 3D rendering.
Version 2.3b was released on November 4, 2006, and now has full Nintendo DS sound emulation.
Version 2.3d was released on February 23, 2007, and added microphone support and improving 3D video rendering.
Version 2.4b was released on June 5, 2007, introducing for the first time Nintendo DS Wi-Fi emulation, with the application being able to send and receive packets but the information was still getting stuck in commercial games during the transmission.
Version 2.4d was released on August 21, 2007, improving Wi-Fi and wireless local communications being able to exchange authentications on Picto Chat, but the exchange of actual information was still impossible.
Version 2.4e was released on September 3, 2007, and added support for Action Replay and Codebreaker cheats.
Version 2.5 was released on October 4, 2007, and was able to run games at a faster frame rate thanks to CPU and 3D rendering improvements.
Version 2.5b was released on November 3, 2007, and added 3D frameskip.
Version 2.6 was released on December 18, 2007, and was able to run games at a higher frame rate thanks to the addition of 3D software rendering using OpenGL.
Version 2.6a was released on January 23, 2008, and was able to run games twice as fast compared to 2.6 thanks to various optimizations.
Version 2.7 was released on May 23, 2013, and included various GUI improvements.
Version 2.7a was released on August 17, 2013, and added fullscreen support.
Version 2.7b was released on November 10, 2013, and added 16-bit audio and a bigger nds_flash.sav file.
Version 2.7c was released on July 28, 2014, and added a new memory system, snapshots support, and both No$GBA and No$GBA Debug Version were made freeware from this point forwards, including retroactive availability for previous versions locked behind a paywall.
Version 2.7d was released on November 9, 2014, and included the first internal Nintendo DSi functionality.
Version 2.8 was released on February 2, 2015, and included working Nintendo DSi emulation (estimated to be 50% complete).
Version 2.8a was released on May 3, 2015, and included fixes to using the eMMC file system.
Version 2.8b was released on June 1, 2015, and included bootcode and launcher support for the Nintendo DSi.
Version 2.8c was released on May 7, 2016, and included Nintendo DSi firmware support and bugfixes.
Version 2.8d was released on May 26, 2016, and included support for SD Cards and unencrypted RSA signatures.
Version 2.8e was released on February 11, 2017, and added the TeakLite II assembler.
Version 2.8f was released on July 23, 2017, and focused on bug fixes.
Version 2.9 was released on June 14, 2018, and fixed a Nintendo DSi exploit. An option to make a donation via credit or debit card was added to the GUI.
Version 2.9a was released on July 24, 2018, and added the ARM9 134 MHz mode (although waitstates were too fast at this point for it to be viable).
Version 2.9b was released on September 30, 2018, and saw the debut of the No$GBA Patreon page. 8-bit VRAM writes are now possible with Nintendo DSi ROMs.
Version 2.9c was released on February 8, 2019, and included reverse-engineered WPA and WPA2 encryption support for the Nintendo DS Wi-Fi.
Version 2.9d was released on February 23, 2019, and now disables the profiler by default, resulting in faster emulation.
Version 2.9e was released on July 12, 2019, and adds additional functionality to the Wi-Fi and Nintendo 3DS stacks.
Version 3.00 was released on November 27, 2019.
NO$GBA Debug Version[ | ]
The NO$GBA Debug Version is a development tool for testing and debugging of Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS software created by Martin Korth, supporting source code-level debugging; the tool is designed for programmers, as the features provided are largely useless for gamers. The debugging application is freeware.