The GBA emulator “mGBA” supports emulating the Game Boy Advance Link Cable (not to be confused with the Game Boy Advance /Game/ Link Cable) and connecting to a running Dolphin emulator instance. I am interested in this functionality for Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures, specifically the “Navi Trackers” game mode that was announced for all regions but was only released in Japan and Korea. In the future I want to explore the English language patches.

Instead when connecting mGBA to Dolphin I received... nothing. No error, success, or UI change! I found out from researching online that I needed a GBA BIOS to connect to Dolphin. This blog post is about how to compile a GBA BIOS dumping ROM on Ubuntu 24.04.

Read more: https://sethmlarson.dev/mgba-to-dolphin-not-working-you-need-a-gba-bios