this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2025
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I have an Rpi with Batocera installed and two SNES controllers connected with USB.

I can play NES and SNES multiplayer games perfectly fine, but not on GBA.

Is there any way to emulate local multiplayer gaming on Game Boy Advance?

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[–] Redkey@programming.dev 4 points 4 days ago

As a handheld console, the GBA hardware was explicitly designed to support exactly one player. To play multiplayer GBA games on real hardware, either the game must have some kind of "hotseat" mode, or you need to have multiple consoles connected via link cables.

A "hotseat" game should run just fine on an emulator without any tweaking, so I'm guessing that's not what you want.

That means you're wanting to emulate multiple GBAs at once. But RetroArch is designed to run only one instance of one emulator at a time. I'm somewhat surprised to learn (although I suppose I shouldn't have been) that someone has created a RetroArch core that emulates two Gameboys/Gameboy Colors at once. But it doesn't look like anyone's done the same for the GBA. So AFAIK your only option is to have two separate Batocera devices (one for each GBA) connected over a network (if that's possible with your Pi and the emulator supports it).