GBA Emulators

[Nyxaelia]

Hey there!

Hey there,

I recently tried to use a GBA Emulator to play Pokemon FireRed. This is my first time ever playing gameboy games, unfortunately I did not grow up with consoles... And it is also my first time using an emulator. I used VisualBoyAdvance with no issues at first, except it seems to not to save properly. I can save from the menu, get an error message, quit and the save will be there, but the save file doesn't appear in the VBA folders and if it quits/crashes or anything else I lose all my data.

My charizard was nearly level 40, now I have to start again....

I've been trawling the internet for solutions to the save issue with VBA, but nothing seems to work. I've looked at other emulators like No$GBA and Boycott but they seem to all come with issues of their own before I even get to saving anything.

I'm using a Macbook Air, OS X 10.9.3

Does anyone have any solution that actually works to make VBA work, or know of an emulator for mac that runs smoothly?

Thanks heaps!

Nyx.

EDIT: My Emulator Journey

VisualBoyAdvance: Issues Saving
No$GBA: Issues with Window Size
Boycott: Issues with spontaneous quitting with no explanation

OpenEmu: Great interface, and saves properly.

 

[Nyxaelia]

Ok.. I've been doing a little fiddling around with Boycott and so far it seems to be working alright.

 

[Yakibomb]

I haven't used it myself, but i'm told OpenEmu is a pretty decent emulator

 

[Nyxaelia]

Boycott works, it actually saves and the game seems to run pretty well. EXCEPT. It appears to spontaneously quit with no warning and no error dialogue, meaning if you haven't saved recently you're back where your last save was. It seems to quit after a couple of minutes.

I am going to try OpenEmu now.

 

[Nyxaelia]

OpenEmu is so great! I love the UI and it appears to be working smoothly, saving and loading works perfectly, the quick save and quick load function is amazing. Will update this thread if I encounter any issues.

Thankyou so much!

 

[Kaylor]

OpenEmu is so great! I love the UI and it appears to be working smoothly, saving and loading works perfectly, the quick save and quick load function is amazing. Will update this thread if I encounter any issues.

Thankyou so much!

I love OpenEmu. The only issue I've ever had with it is corrupted save states (I think it calls them quick saves, command-S in game), but it's only happened when I reload the same save state an excessive number of times. I use it to play Kaizo Mario 64 and Super Mario 74, two decently difficult Super Mario 64 ROM hacks, so I save state a ton and on some of the really difficult parts, I wind up loading the same save state at least 30 times. Don't know if it's because I suck that bad or they're just that hard