GBA DS Emulator Turns Game Boy Advance Titles Into Dual-Screen Games

If you're a fan of handhleds like the AYN Thor and Retroid Pocket Duo but don't want to move out of the GBA era of games (we get it, it was an amazing time for handheld gaming), then there's a new emulator that can make the most out of both of your screens. Ditch swapping to your map or game standings and see both at the same time with GBA DS, an emulator that supports 51 GBA titles.

The emulator comes to us from kyannon and even has a browser version in the Beta testing stage. Here's a full list of the games that work with the emulator as of now with the release of V1.5:

So how does GBA DS work? Well, it uses the Game Boy Advance emulator libmgba as its base. GBA DS then runs a silent copy of the emulator next to the first one, copying the live game status into the silent copy at intervals of one second. It also checks the result two ways before showing and records short loops of frames so blinking icons and player markers still have the same animations as they would on the GBA. It makes games like Metroid Fusion look as though they were made for the DS in the first place, which is really cool!

If there are games without a map like Mario Kart Super Circuit, then it creates two frames - one without the HUD and one with just the HUD, repositioning information on the bottom screen and expanding the small map so it sits on the bottom screen. It's all very clever! Version 1.5 also brings cool features like being able to customise the screen bezel, change hotkeys, and apply different patches to games.

GBA DS has been tested by kyannon primarily on the RG DS Plus. It can be downloaded via BananaOS if you're using an RG DS handheld, or there are versions for Android and Linux-based OS ROCKNIX. As I mentioned above, there's also a version for browsers that's in Beta, allowing you to access dual-screen features on your smartphone from your browser while on the move.

I do need to mention, for transparency, that kyannon has listed Claude as a contributor in GBA DS. Claude's level of involvement hasn't been made public, so I'm not sure how much kyannon relied on AI in the making of this emulator and how much is human-led, but I just wanted to mention it so you're aware.

You can download the latest release of GBA DS from GitHub. Remember that you'll need legally acquired ROMs of your games to make this work as it doesn't come with any ROM files.