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Full Version: Framerate and controller problems
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Hello.
I've been using VBA 1.8 Link version ever since I remember, it's a great emulator, but very old, and has problems with some games.

I was reading about some newer emulators and decided to try VBA-M, however compared to VBA 1.8, VBA-M was dropping some frames and the gameplay wasn't as smooth and fluid as it was in VBA 1.8. Not to mention, the speedup option in VBA-M is terrible compared to 1.8.

So, I decided to try mGBA, which is hyped to be the best GBA emulator. Right off the bat, I noticed that 60fps games are giving me 30fps (or less) and it felt terrible. I made sure that frameskip is set to 0, I checked around every setting I could, but with no results. Then I changed the audio buffer to 512 samples and it improved the FPS, however I still noticed it's not as smooth as VBA 1.8. I launched side-by-side VBA 1.8 and mGBA and it was easy to tell which one had more smooth framerate.

There's also one more problem with mGBA that I cannot solve, in tools->settings->controllers I have two "USB gamepad" controllers to choose from. The one that's working is the second one, so I need to choose it and click apply for the controller to work. However, each time I restart mGBA, it reverts back to the first one, and I have to manually go into settings and set it to the second one. Every time I launch the mGBA.

I tried messing around with control panel, I went into controller settings and marked the correct controller as "default", but it still didn't help in mGBA case.

I'm looking forward to the development of mGBA, however I find it weird that an "outdated" emulator like VBA 1.8 can handle framerates much better than the "new" emulators such as VBA-M and mGBA.
Up. I posted specifically about the performance issues in Pokemon, then I found this thread. These performance issues are the only reasons I can't ditch VBA.