Hi, I'm playing Pokémon FireRed on mGBA 0.10.5 on my mac(macOS26.0.1). I created a “multiplayer window,” but when I tried to use the in-game save on my first window — the .sav file doesn’t update (the “Date Modified” still shows yesterday). Only the second window generates a .sa2 file. I don’t know why this is happening or what went wrong.

Hello,

Simple question, I have a savefile from open_agb_firm on 3DS and I want to put it on my Switch. I can't find an option for this, and putting the savefile next to my rom (same name) didn't work. Could someone please point me in the right direction?

I am pretty far into Fire Red, I wanted to spawn in a Golmen, Machamp, Gengar, and Alakazam to complete the pokedex since they are only attainable via trade. I had started with the max money cheat to test the cheats, but it could not get any to work. Need help. I'm on windows download mGBA.

I'm trying to move over a 2 save files from gambatte for use with mGBA (I want to do multiplayer trading). The save files were generated in retroarch/gambatte on an anbernic device.

I'm trying to get them to run in standalone mGBA 0.10.5 on my Windows PC.

I'm fairly new to ROMS so been having to do a lot of Reserarch/experimentation but I managed to get one of the 2 games working. I was unable to copy and convert the save file from my anbernic, so I had to copy the state file to my PC, load that into retroarch/gambatte, create a new save file on the PC in that, then run that through a srm to sav converted.

My second game however, nothing seems to work. If I do the same as above, the game freezes when trying to load the file. using a transferred state file, I got the state loaded on the pc using retroarch/mgba core. However the sound is glitchy and when I create a save file, it still can't be loaded into the mGBA standalone.

Any guidance on how to fix this is appreciated.

Hi, does anyone else have an issue with assigning keys to L & R on controllers?
I have Retrobit Legacy16 Wired USB Controller and the L & R is not being picked up when assigning keys.
It does pick up the LZ and RZ buttons, but not the big L & R ones.
If anyone has a solution, please advise.
L & R work fine on other emulators.

im confused on how to convert my sa2 file to sav

Windows 10, 64-bit
The rewind button seems to crash the game and the emulator with the "jumped to an incorrect address" error on the regular version of mGBA.
On the 64x version of mGBA, however, the rewind doesn't seem to function at all, no matter how much I press the button I assigned or change the controls.

This is on the latest version of mGBA I got from the site - 0.10.5 - but the older one I had before - 0.10.1 had the same issue.

Is there a solution to this?

Hi,

I am somewhat new to GBA dev, I only ever touched features mentioned in the TONC tutorials.

I would like to use the serial port to communicate between my ROM and the emulator. Is it possible with mGBA ? Do you have any reference on how to do it ? I would assume it requires using the Lua scripting capabilities.

Thanks !

What I am trying to do.
Drawing a hexagonal grid looks better with a 7x8 tile, so during the horizontal blanking interval I am trying to skip the 8th row of every tile. There are 7 drawn rows on each tile and the 8th row that is completely black to make it obvious if something isn't working. The horizontal blanking code is not running as the tiles and background are setup. Once everything is setup the horizontal blanking code is active.

Description of the Symptom.
It reliably skips the 8th row on a Gameboy Advance SP and the visual boy advance emulator, but on mGBA it is showing the 8th row on some tiles on the right edge of the screen. For some reason the row that the cursor is on never has the problem.

My thought.
The thing that would make sense to me is that the horizontal blanking is being triggered early. This is supported by the line the cursor is on never having the issue. The cursor being drawn would delay the horizontal blanking trigger by just a hair preventing it from running the horizontal blanking code early. I tried to see if my code was the issue but I didn't find anything to try to do differently.

Relevant Source Code Pseudo Code:
Setup
0xFF40 |= 0x02
0xFF41 = 0x08
0xFFFF = 0x03
Horizontal Blanking
shift_counter = shift_counter + 1
if(shift_counter == 7) {
shift_counter = 0
horizontal_shift = horizontal_shift + 4
vertical_shift = vertical_shift + 1
0xFF42 = vertical_shift
0xFF43 = horizontal_shift
}


Specifications
mGBA: 0.10.5 flathub system-wide flatpak
OS: Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS (64-bit)
GNOME Version: 42.9
Windowing System: X11
CPU: Intel® Core™ i7-9750H CPU @ 2.60GHz × 12
Graphics Card: Mesa Intel® UHD Graphics 630 (CFL GT2)

Rom and Symptom Image are Attached.
It didn't let me load the rom directly so I changed the file type to txt. Change it back to .gb before using.

Attached Files

  code_rom.txt (Size: 32 KB / Downloads: 2)
  Screenshot from 2025-07-05 16-11-47.png (Size: 15.19 KB / Downloads: 3)

Hello,

I recently started using mGBA and I was hoping that I could transfer my VBA saves to mGBA. The .SAV file is in the same folder, with the same name as the ROM, however for some reason, whenever I boot up the game, the game starts anew, clearly failing to recognise the .SAV file as being present. Could it be thew file size? From what I understand, mGBA creates 32kb .SAV files, whereas the file in the folder is 128kb. If my presumption is correct, how could I go about changing the file size, if possible? If not, what could be causing the issue?