Emulators

SuperFW supports certain console emulators for the GBA. In fact, it ships a built-in copy of Jagoomba Color so that it can load and play GameBoy and GameBoy Color ROMs out of the box (except for Supercard Lite version, which requires you to install it).

For other emulators it is necessary to download and install them in the SD card. The “chis” variant ships built-in emulators for most platforms, so you don’t have to install them in order to use them.

Platform Emulator ROM file Website
Nintendo NES PocketNES .nes dwedit.org/gba/pocketnes.php
SG-1000 SMS Advance .sg archive.org/details/smsadvance-25-bin
Sega Master System SMS Advance / DrSMS .sms www.webpersona.com/drsms
Game Gear SMS Advance / DrSMS .gg
NeoGeo Pocket Color NGPGBA .ngc github.com/FluBBaOfWard/NGPGBA
Watara Supervision WasabiGBA .sv github.com/FluBBaOfWard/WasabiGBA
Game Boy (Color) Goomba(Color) .gb/gbc dwedit.org/gba/goombacolor.php
PC Engine (PCE) PCEAdvance .pce github.com/patters-match/pceadvance

Installing the emulators is as simple as downloading the release binary (a .gba ROM file) and copying it to the .superfw/emulators/ directory. The files must have the right name so they can be found by SuperFW, namely:

Emulator File Download link Mirror
PocketNES pocketnes.gba https://www.dwedit.org/gba/pocketnes.php
SMS Advance smsadvance.gba https://archive.org/download/smsadvance-25-bin ⚠️ v2.5 patched
DrSMS drsms.gba https://www.webpersona.com/drsms/downloads.html ⚠️ v6.0 patched
NGPGBA ngpgba.gba https://github.com/FluBBaOfWard/NGPGBA/releases
WasabiGBA wasabigba.gba https://github.com/FluBBaOfWard/WasabiGBA/releases
Goomba gbc-emu.gba https://www.dwedit.org/gba/goombacolor.php
PCEAdvance pceadvance.gba https://github.com/patters-match/pceadvance/releases v7.5 patched
Emulators must be compatible with Supercard. Some of them, like SMS Advance and DrSMS are not compatible out of the box and they much be patched. You can download patched versions from the mirror links in the above table.

If the emulator binary is not properly installed you might see an error message when launching a ROM.

Error message caused by a missing emulator binary

Note that there’s no need to install Goomba (or any fork, GoombaColor, JagoombaColor …) to play GB/GBC games, SuperFW has a built-in JagoombaColor copy (unless you are using the SC Lite, in this case there’s not built-in copy sorry!). However you are free to install your favourite emulator/fork and it will take preference over the built-in emulator.

To use any of the emulators, simply browse the desired ROM (as you do with GBA ROMs) and press A to load it. SuperFW will load the emulator binary as well as the ROM and launch it.

Most GBA emulators assume that the cartridge has SRAM storage, for the purposes of storing savegames as well as savestates (if/whenever they are supported). SuperFW will write the SRAM contents to a .sav file on reboot, to preserve its contents.

For some emulators like GoombaColor / PocketNES / SMSAdvance you will need to exit the emulator gracefully to ensure the save game is written correctly: press L+R and pick Exit and the emulator will reset your GBA. You should see the game being saved to the SD card, once that is complete, you might shut down your device.

These emulators usually use a non-standard save format, specific to them. If you need to convert from/to a regular (raw) format, you might wanna use a converter (for instance https://savefileconverter.com/#/flash-carts by picking GBA and your emulator name).