by SeriousS
Copyright © 2003 SeriousS, All rights reserved.
Part One: Obtaining and Installing VBA
Part Two: Configuring the Game Pad
Part Three: Customizing Video and the Keyboard
Part Four: Loading and Playing Games
Part Five: Saving your Game Progress
Part Six: Customizing the VBA Interface
This document is intended to help those who are new to VisualBoyAdvance (hereafter referred to as VBA) to quickly get acquainted with this awesome piece of emulation software. In no time at all you will be playing Game Boy Advance (GBA) games on your PC, having the time of your life. :) I'm not sure how helpful this document will be to those who already possess a familiarity with VBA. Likewise, this document is not intended for programmers or those interested in the development-oriented aspects of VBA. (In the future I may publish a guide that covers the advanced features of VBA.)
The quickest and most efficient means for obtaining the latest version of the VBA software is to visit Forgotten's home page:
In case you haven't surmised it already, Forgotten is the creator of VisualBoyAdvance. Don't be confused by the plethora of options on the Downloads page; simply download the latest Windows version of the software and be done with it. :)
Once you have downloaded the latest version of VBA to your hard drive, you'll need to extract the VBA files from the .ZIP archive. To do this, you'll need WinZip (www.winzip.com) or another ZIP file management utility. Once the files are unpacked, you'll see the files that are shown in the following graphic:
The file that we are most concerned with, of course, is called VisualBoyAdvance.exe. To start VBA, double-click this file.
For convenience, you might want to create a separate folder somewhere on your hard drive called ROMs, in which you can store your GBA ROMs. Of course, I'm not going to address how one obtains GBA game ROMs--that is up to you to do. I'll just assume that you have one ore more ROMs available for the remainder of this tutorial.
At this point you've got VBA downloaded and installed. Before we go any further, let's configure our controls.
To configure your controls (virtual game pad), open VBA and click Options => Joypad => Configure => 1....
In the resulting Joypad Configuration dialog box, simply select each command and assign an appropriate key to it. Don't worry about the Speed:, Capture: and GS: commands; concentrate on the others, which all correspond to controls on an actual GBA or GBA-SP. Click OK when you're finished.
You'll note that you can create up to four joypad profiles for VBA. To select another joypad configuration as the default, click Options => Joypad => Default Joypad, and select a number from the submenu.
First of all, you will probably want to crank up the VBA screen size so you don't strain your eyes when you're playing. To do this, click Options => Video, and select x2 from the submenu. This will boost your screen size to double its original value. Play around with the other video settings if you're interested.
Another option you'll probably want to make sure you enable is the use of your PC's full color palette as opposed to the GBA's limited color palette. To perform this action, click Options => Gameboy => Real Colors.
Now then--one really cool thing about VBA is that you can save your progress at any point. By default, the key combination that maps to the SAVE function is SHIFT+1 through SHIFT+10. Now wouldn't it be better to use an easier-to-reach key combination, such as ALT+1 through ALT+10. Well, it happens that you can assign a custom key combination to just about every menu command found in VBA. To do this, click Tools => Customize....
In the Accelerator editor dialog box, select a VBA command from the Commands: list box, and then type a key combination in the Select New Shortcut Key: text box. Click Assign to make the key assignment. Click OK to save changes and close the Accelerator editor dialog box.
Now we get to the good stuff, eh? Exactly how does one play GBA games by using VBA? By far the easiest way to do this is to simply drag your .GBA game ROM file on top of the VBA interface; the game will load automatically.
Alternatively, you can click File => Open... and browse for the .GBA ROM file. To open a Game Boy mono (.GB) game ROM file, or a Game Boy Color (.GBC) game ROM file, click File => Open Gameboy... and browse to the location of the ROM file.
One more thing: VBA keeps a list of the last several games that were loaded. To quickly load up a recently played game, click File => Recent, and select a game from the most-recently used (MRU) list.
As you are playing, feel free to use the File => Save Game and File => Load Game commands to save and to load save states, respectively. With a game running on hardware you might only be able to save once per level or you might have to remember long and cryptic passwords. With VBA, however, you can save any ol' time you please! :)
By default, gameplay is paused whenever you click outside of the VBA window; alternatively, you can click File => Pause to pause the game. Click the Pause command again to unpause. The File => Reset command has the same effect as turning off your GBA and then turning it back on.
The File => Save Game function saves your game progress internally. To save your game progress as an external file, you have a couple of options. Clicking File => Save... allows you to save your game progress as a VisualBoyAdvance Save Game (.SGM) file, which can then be loaded back into VBA at a later time.
To save your game progress as a battery save file (.SAV), which can be applied to a .GBA ROM on a flash cart, click File => Export => Battery File....
To load a .SAV battery file (perhaps exported from your flash cart) into VBA, open your game ROM and then select File => Import => Battery File.... In the Select Battery File dialog box, browse to the .SAV file and click Open to load the savegame.
To load an .SGM save game, click File => Load, browse to the location of the .SGM file, and click Open in the Select save game name dialog box.
The only VBA customization element that I am going to discuss in this Quick Start Guide is the use of skins, because they are very cool. First of all, you need to visit www.vba-skins.com or a similar site to download some VBA skins. Once you've done that we can proceed to the next step.
In VBA, click Options => Video => Render Method => Select Skin....
In the resulting Select the skin file name dialog box, browse to the location of the skin's .INI file. Select the file and click Save.
The following screen capture shows you ShaunJ66's amazing GBA-SP Platinum skin in action. Pretty awesome, isn't it?
Incidentally, you want to right-click on the skin to access the VBA menu system. This isn't an obvious point by any means!
I hope that you found this Quick Start Guide helpful. If you have any corrections or suggestions as to how I can make this guide more helpful, then please don't hesitate to write me. Thanks a lot--enjoy your gaming with VBA!