VisualBoyAdvance

» see sourceforge.net/projects/vba as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Nintendo hardware reached Turkey through importers and customs duty, at a price that made a console a decision rather than a purchase. So the games ran on PCs instead. Emulation here was not nostalgia for a machine somebody had grown up with, it was the only route most people were ever going to have to those games, and for anything with Game Boy written on the box the program you used was VisualBoyAdvance.

It was written by one person. The handle was Forgotten and that is very close to the whole record: no interviews and no name attached to any of it. The project started in 1999 as a Game Boy emulator and picked up Game Boy Color along the way. By 2002 it was running Game Boy Advance games well enough that the version number went to 1.0.

What made it spread was not accuracy. It put a save state on a function key and the entire download fit in under two megabytes, which on a Turkish dial-up line meant you had it in a few minutes rather than overnight. Cheat codes came built in. You could take a screenshot of a game that had never been on a screen bigger than a matchbox.

One detail says more about how far it traveled than any download counter. From version 1.7 the Windows build shipped with its interface translated into Turkish. Not by a company, by whoever in the emulation scene volunteered to do it. Somebody sat down and translated the menus of an unlicensed Game Boy emulator into Turkish, because enough people there were using it to make that worth an evening.

~ the case file ~

~ the climb ~

VBA became the default because it did the boring things right. It ran on Windows and the SDL build ran on Linux and macOS, so a Linux user in 2003 had a working Game Boy without hunting for one. Later it turned up on the Wii and on the Zune HD, which only makes sense once you understand how far the code had gotten from its author.

There is a second audience that gets left out of this story. Homebrew developers used VBA as a debugger. It gave them a way to step through code and watch memory that Nintendo's own kit never put in front of amateurs, and an academic history of the Game Boy Advance published by MIT Press credits the emulator with contributing greatly to what came out of the platform in its late years. The tool built to break the console ended up teaching people how to write for it.

~ the funny part ~

In february 2014 somebody piped the chat of a Twitch stream into VBA through an IRC bot and let the internet play Pokémon Red by typing directions at it. Twitch Plays Pokémon ran for sixteen days and drew over a million participants before the game was beaten, with a hundred and twenty one thousand people watching at the peak. The emulator underneath had been abandoned for a decade at that point and nobody involved seems to have noticed.

~ the long tail ~

Forgotten left in 2004 and the project went to a team led by his brother. Version 1.7.2 on 25 may 2004 is the last build most people ever downloaded. A preview called 1.8.0 beta 3 appeared on 1 october 2005, and after that nothing appeared at all.

Because the license was GPL the code did not die with the project, it scattered. VBALink added real link cable emulation between two running copies, and other people fixed sound and video. In 2007 those forks were merged back into one codebase called VBA-M, where the M stands for merge, and that version is still getting releases twenty years later. RetroArch runs a descendant of it. The original binary is a museum piece that still works.

There is no shutdown notice for VisualBoyAdvance. Nobody turned off a server. One person stopped answering and the rest of the internet carried on without him, which is a quieter way to go than most things buried here.

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