mGBA is a new generation of Game Boy Advance emulator. The project started in April 2013 with the goal of being fast enough to run on lower end hardware than other emulators support, without sacrificing accuracy or portability. Even in the initial version, games generally played without problems. mGBA has only gotten better since then, and now boasts being the most accurate GBA emulator around.

Further along in development mGBA gained Game Boy support and eventually is planned to have DS support too. Other goals include accurate enough emulation to provide a development environment for homebrew software, a good workflow for tool-assist runners, and a modern feature set for emulators that older emulators may not support.

Here it is: a real restoration project for the infamous Donkey Kong Country for GBA. It wasn’t a bad port after all, the gameplay was completely intact and also had the new Hero and Attack modes.

It’s still a little behind from the SNES version due to the resolution reducement and soundtrack (which sounds worse, but still sounds good!). But it’s an undeniable improvement.

This wasn’t the typical SNES to GBA palette restoration. This was hell. After Rare reduced all sprites and tilesets, none of the palettes matched so they had to be repaletted manually using Photoshop and a custom tool made exclusively for this.