Play GBA games on your Mac with this cool freeware.
VisualBoy Advance is an emulator for the Mac that allows Mac users to play Gameboy Advance games on their computers, as long as they have the roms. Roms, however, must be owned in hard copy in order for them to be legal. I, nor Brighthub, will tell you where to get GBA roms.
Download and Installation (4 out of 5)
You can download VisualBoy Advance at this website . Once downloaded, VisualBoy Advance will open on your desktop. Drag and drop the file in you Applications folder and you are ready to play.
Features (2 out of 5)
VisualBoy Advance emulates Gameboy Advance games for the Mac, and since the GBA also played Gameboy Color roms VisualBoy Advance does too. However, there is no support for original Gameboy games.
Like most emulators of consoles, VisualBoy Advance offers users some control over window size, sound and emulation speed. However, it does not offer controller support, although you can configure the keyboard to your liking. VisualBoy Advance also supports battery saves and save states, each of which have a handy folder.
Also, VisualBoy Advance supports GBA BIOS, but you don’t need one to use it.
Running VisualBoy Advance I found a few problems with the sound (it skipped in places) and changing the screen size (the program crashed when I tried to do it while running a rom), but otherwise everything worked okay.
Usefulness (3 out of 5)
Yeah, VisualBoy Advance will emulate GBA and GBC games, which is all well and good, but the lack of controller support is off putting. With controller support, this Gameboy Advance emulator for the Mac would have been much better, even with its few bugs. Without controller support it makes it hard to want to use VisualBoy Advance.
Overall (2 out of 5)
VisualBoy Advance works just fine, but the lack of controller support make it difficult to get behind. If you want a great GBA emu for the Mac, look elsewhere.
