VisualBoyAdvance (commonly abbreviated as VBA ) is a free emulator of the Game Boy , Game Boy Color , and Game Boy Advance handheld game consoles as well as of Super Game Boy and Super Game Boy 2 . It is still downloadable to this day.
59-511: Besides the DirectX version for the Windows platform, there is also one that is based on the free platform independent graphics library SDL . This is available for a variety of operating systems including Linux , BSD , Mac OS X , and BeOS . VisualBoyAdvance has also been ported to AmigaOS 4 , AROS , GameCube , Wii , webOS , and Zune HD . The VisualBoyAdvance project was started by
118-414: A device driver . Hardware manufacturers have to write these drivers for a particular DirectX version's device driver interface (or DDI), and test each individual piece of hardware to make them DirectX compatible. Some hardware devices have only DirectX compatible drivers (in other words, one must install DirectX in order to use that hardware). Early versions of DirectX included an up-to-date library of all of
177-602: A "battle" began between supporters of the cross-platform OpenGL and the Windows-only Direct3D. Incidentally, OpenGL was supported at Microsoft by the DirectX team. If a developer chose to use the OpenGL 3D graphics API in computer games , the other APIs of DirectX besides Direct3D were often combined with OpenGL because OpenGL does not include all of DirectX's functionality (such as sound or joystick support). In
236-502: A base standard. Major scheduled features including GPGPU support ( DirectCompute ), and Direct3D 11 with tessellation support and improved multi-threading support to assist video game developers in developing games that better utilize multi-core processors. Parts of the new API such as multi-threaded resource handling can be supported on Direct3D 9/10/10.1-class hardware. Hardware tessellation and Shader Model 5.0 require Direct3D 11 supporting hardware. Microsoft has since released
295-403: A console-specific version, DirectX was used as a basis for Microsoft's Xbox , Xbox 360 and Xbox One console API. The API was developed jointly between Microsoft and Nvidia , which developed the custom graphics hardware used by the original Xbox. The Xbox API was similar to DirectX version 8.1, but is non-updateable like other console technologies. The Xbox was code named DirectXbox, but this
354-650: A cross-platform, window system independent software interface to graphics hardware by Silicon Graphics, Inc. to bring 3D graphics programming into the mainstream of application programming. Besides it could also be used for 2D graphics and imaging and was controlled by the Architectural Review Board (ARB) which included Microsoft. Direct3D was intended to be a Microsoft controlled alternative to OpenGL, focused initially on game use. As 3D gaming grew game developers were discovering that OpenGL could be used effectively for game development. At that point
413-458: A description of how to implement the immediate start of the installation procedure of a software title after inserting its CD-ROM, a feature called AutoPlay, was also part of the SDK. The "Direct" part of the library was so named as these routines bypassed existing core Windows 95 routines and accessed the computer hardware only via a hardware abstraction layer (HAL). Though the team had named it
472-401: A developer under the online alias "Forgotten". When this person left the development of the emulator, the project was handed over to a team named "VBA Team", led by Forgotten's brother. Development on the original VisualBoyAdvance stopped in 2004 with version 1.8.0 beta 3, and a number of forked versions were made by various developers in the years since then, such as VisualBoyAdvance-M. VBA
531-423: A gaming platform in Windows. Alex St. John, the evangelist for DirectX, staged an elaborate event at the 1996 Computer Game Developers Conference which game developer Jay Barnson described as a Roman theme, including real lions , togas, and something resembling an indoor carnival. It was at this event that Microsoft first introduced Direct3D , and demonstrated multiplayer MechWarrior 2 being played over
590-419: A gaming platform, but the three committed towards this project's development. Their rebellious nature led Brad Silverberg , the senior vice president of Microsoft's office products, to name the trio the "Beastie Boys". Most of the work by the three was done among other assigned projects starting near the end of 1994. Within four months and with input from several hardware manufacturers, the team had developed
649-409: A more accessible way for developers to produce shaders. DirectX 9.0c was an update to the original, and has been continuously changed over the years affecting its compatibility with older operating systems. As of January 2007, Windows 2000 and Windows XP became the minimum required operating systems. This means support was officially dropped for Windows 98 and Windows Me. As of August 2024, DirectX 9.0c
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#1732783665377708-601: A previous version's DDI. The application programmer had to query the available hardware capabilities using a complex system of "cap bits" each tied to a particular hardware feature. Direct3D 7 and earlier would work on any version of the DDI, Direct3D 8 requires a minimum DDI level of 6 and Direct3D 9 requires a minimum DDI level of 7. However, the Direct3D 10 runtime in Windows Vista cannot run on older hardware drivers due to
767-634: A single assembly, thus simplifying dependencies on it for software developers, development on this version has subsequently been discontinued, and it is no longer supported. The Managed DirectX 2.0 library expired on October 5, 2006. During the GDC 2006, Microsoft presented the XNA Framework , a new managed version of DirectX (similar but not identical to Managed DirectX) that is intended to assist development of games by making it easier to integrate DirectX, HLSL and other tools in one package. It also supports
826-405: A system simultaneously; multi-GPU support was previously dependent on vendor implementations such as AMD CrossFireX or NVIDIA SLI . DirectX 12 is supported on all Fermi and later Nvidia GPUs, on AMD's GCN -based chips and on Intel's Haswell and later processors' graphics units. At SIGGRAPH 2014, Intel released a demo showing a computer generated asteroid field , in which DirectX 12
885-512: Is backwards compatible with Game Boy and Game Boy Color . VBA-M's GBA emulation core was ported into RetroArch / Libretro , without the GB, GBC and SGB cores. as well as a modified version called VBA-Next. VBA-GX is a port of VBA-M to Nintendo Wii . It enables motion controls for emulated Game Boy Advance games. The VisualBoyAdvance became the most popular GBA emulator for the Unix platform and
944-559: Is an API that used to be a part of Microsoft 's DirectX API . DirectDraw is used to accelerate rendering of 2D graphics in applications. DirectDraw also allows applications to run fullscreen or embedded in a window such as most other MS Windows applications. DirectDraw uses hardware acceleration if it is available on the client's computer . DirectDraw allows direct access to video memory , hardware overlays , hardware blitters , and page flipping . Its video memory manager can manipulate video memory with ease, taking full advantage of
1003-484: Is an improved fork from the inactive VisualBoyAdvance project, adding several features as well as maintaining an up-to-date codebase. After VisualBoyAdvance became inactive in 2004, several forks began to appear such as VBALink, which allowed users to emulate the linking of two Game Boy devices. Eventually, VBA-M was created, which merged several of the forks into one codebase. Thus, the M in VBA-M stands for Merge . VBA-M
1062-552: Is an incremental update of Direct3D 10.0 which shipped with, and required, Windows Vista Service Pack 1 , which was released in February 2008. This release mainly sets a few more image quality standards for graphics vendors, while giving developers more control over image quality. It also adds support for cube map arrays, separate blend modes per-MRT, coverage mask export from a pixel shader, ability to run pixel shader per sample, access to multi-sampled depth buffers and requires that
1121-442: Is only available with Windows Vista (launched in late 2006) and later. Previous versions of Windows such as Windows XP are not able to run DirectX 10-exclusive applications. Rather, programs that are run on a Windows XP system with DirectX 10 hardware simply resort to the DirectX 9.0c code path, the latest available for Windows XP computers. Changes for DirectX 10 were extensive. Many former parts of DirectX API were deprecated in
1180-568: Is still regularly updated. Windows XP SP2 and newer include DirectX 9.0c, but may require a newer DirectX runtime redistributable installation for DirectX 9.0c applications compiled with the February 2005 DirectX 9.0 SDK or newer. DirectX 9 had a significant impact on game development. Many games from the mid-2000s to early 2010s were developed using DirectX 9 and it became a standard target for developers. Even today, some games still use DirectX 9 as an option for older or less powerful hardware. A major update to DirectX API, DirectX 10 ships with and
1239-445: Is the most widely publicized component of DirectX, it is common to see the names "DirectX" and "Direct3D" used interchangeably. The DirectX software development kit (SDK) consists of runtime libraries in redistributable binary form, along with accompanying documentation and headers for use in coding. Originally, the runtimes were only installed by games or explicitly by the user. Windows 95 did not launch with DirectX, but DirectX
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#17327836653771298-632: The Cross-platform Audio Creation Tool (XACT), while the DirectX pattern has been continued for Windows APIs such as Direct2D and DirectWrite . Direct3D (the 3D graphics API within DirectX) is widely used in the development of video games for Microsoft Windows and the Xbox line of consoles. Direct3D is also used by other software applications for visualization and graphics tasks such as CAD/CAM engineering. As Direct3D
1357-614: The Microsoft Platform SDK instead. DirectX has been confirmed to be present in Microsoft's Windows Phone 8 . Real-time raytracing was announced as DXR in 2018. Support for compiling HLSL to SPIR-V was also added in the DirectX Shader Compiler the same year. DirectX is composed of multiple APIs: Microsoft has deprecated the following components: DirectX functionality is provided in
1416-399: The blitting and color decompression capabilities of different types of display adapters . Because DirectDraw is a 2D API, it contains commands for 2D rendering and does not support 3D hardware acceleration. A programmer could use DirectDraw to draw 3D graphics, but the rendering would be slow compared to an API such as Direct3D which does support 3D hardware acceleration. DirectDraw
1475-783: The "Game SDK" ( software development kit ), the name "DirectX" came from one journalist that had mocked the naming scheme of the various libraries. The team opted to continue to use that naming scheme and call the project DirectX. The first version of DirectX was released in September 1995 as the Windows Game SDK. Its DirectDraw component was the Win32 replacement for the DCI and WinG APIs for Windows 3.1 . DirectX allowed all versions of Microsoft Windows, starting with Windows 95, to incorporate high-performance multimedia. Eisler wrote about
1534-578: The AMD outperformed the more powerful Nvidia under DirectX 12. The performance discrepancies may be due to poor Nvidia driver optimizations for DirectX 12, or even hardware limitations of the card which was optimized for DirectX 11 serial execution; however, the exact cause remains unclear. The performance improvements of DirectX 12 on the Xbox are not as substantial as on the PC. In March 2018, DirectX Raytracing (DXR)
1593-421: The Direct3D 11 Technical Preview. Direct3D 11 is a strict superset of Direct3D 10.1 — all hardware and API features of version 10.1 are retained, and new features are added only when necessary for exposing new functionality. This helps to keep backwards compatibility with previous versions of DirectX. Four updates for DirectX 11 were released: DirectX 12 was announced by Microsoft at GDC on March 20, 2014, and
1652-516: The DirectX compatible drivers currently available. This practice was stopped however, in favor of the web-based Windows Update driver-update system, which allowed users to download only the drivers relevant to their hardware, rather than the entire library. Prior to DirectX 10, DirectX runtime was designed to be backward compatible with older drivers, meaning that newer versions of the APIs were designed to interoperate with older drivers written against
1711-667: The Internet. The DirectX team faced the challenging task of testing each DirectX release against an array of computer hardware and software . A variety of different graphics cards, audio cards, motherboards, CPUs, input devices, games, and other multimedia applications were tested with each beta and final release. The DirectX team also built and distributed tests that allowed the hardware industry to confirm that new hardware designs and driver releases would be compatible with DirectX. Prior to DirectX Microsoft had added OpenGL to their Windows NT platform. OpenGL had been designed as
1770-475: The WinG interface which came bundled with the game, it crashed so frequently on many desktop systems that parents had flooded Disney 's call-in help lines. St. John recognized the resistances for game development under Windows would be a limitation, and recruited two additional engineers, Craig Eisler and Eric Engstrom , to develop a better solution to get more programmers to develop games for Windows. The project
1829-476: The Windows environment did not provide the necessary features which were available under MS-DOS using BIOS routines or direct hardware access. There were also strong fears of compatibility; a notable case of this was from Disney's Animated Storybook: The Lion King which was based on the WinG programming interface. Due to numerous incompatible graphics drivers from new Compaq computers that were not tested with
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1888-527: The best Game Boy emulators alongside the mGBA, owing to its variety of features and customization options. In a review on the tech blog Techilife , VisualBoyAdvance has been named the oldest and most reliable Game Boy Advance emulator and has been praised for its ease of use. VisualBoyAdvance has many features that would require more work to do on the actual GBA. VisualBoyAdvance supports Fullscreen support, can take advantage of cheat codes from Gameshark and Action Replay , and can take screenshots while playing
1947-667: The emulator contributed "greatly" to the late years of GBA game development by providing a suite of development and visual debugging tools for developers who wanted to create games that surpassed even Nintendo's own. A port from VBA's code was used as the foundation of the Visual Boy Zune, an emulator of the Zune HD . Wesley Akkerman from the Dutch computer magazine Computer!Totaal named the VisualBoyAdvance as one of
2006-449: The execution of managed code on the Xbox 360. The XNA Game Studio Express RTM was made available on December 11, 2006, as a free download for Windows XP. Unlike the DirectX runtime, Managed DirectX , XNA Framework or the Xbox 360 APIs (XInput, XACT etc.) have not shipped as part of Windows. Developers are expected to redistribute the runtime components along with their games or applications. DirectDraw DirectDraw (ddraw.dll)
2065-449: The first published DirectX game. Microsoft promoted the game heavily with Bill Gates appearing in ads for the title. DirectX 2.0 became a built-in component of Windows with the releases of Windows 95 OSR2 and Windows NT 4.0 in mid-1996. Since Windows 95 itself was still new and few games had been released for it, Microsoft engaged in heavy promotion of DirectX to developers who were generally distrustful of Microsoft's ability to build
2124-416: The first set of application programming interfaces (APIs) which they presented at the 1995 Game Developers Conference . The SDK included libraries implementing DirectDraw for bit-mapped graphics, DirectSound for audio, and DirectPlay for communication between players over a network. Furthermore, an extended joystick API already present in Windows 95 was documented for the first time as DirectInput, while
2183-511: The form of COM -style objects and interfaces. Additionally, while not DirectX components themselves, managed objects have been built on top of some parts of DirectX, such as Managed Direct3D and the XNA graphics library on top of Direct3D 9. Microsoft distributes debugging tool for DirectX called "PIX". Introduced by Microsoft in 2002, DirectX 9 was a significant release in the DirectX family. It brought many important features and enhancements to
2242-466: The frenzy to build DirectX 1 through 5 in his blog. To get more developers on board DirectX, Microsoft approached id Software 's John Carmack and offered to port Doom and Doom 2 from MS-DOS to DirectX, free of charge, with id retaining all publishing rights to the game. Carmack agreed, and Microsoft's Gabe Newell led the porting project. The first game was released as Doom 95 in August 1996,
2301-577: The game. Many players would also like to find the ability to customize graphics for a better performance than what was possible on the GBA. DirectX Microsoft DirectX is a collection of application programming interfaces (APIs) for handling tasks related to multimedia , especially game programming and video, on Microsoft platforms. Originally, the names of these APIs all began with "Direct", such as Direct3D , DirectDraw , DirectMusic , DirectPlay , DirectSound , and so forth. The name DirectX
2360-626: The graphics capabilities of Windows. At the time of its release, it supported Windows 98 , Windows Me , Windows 2000 , and Windows XP . As of August 2024 it remains supported by all subsequent versions of Windows for backward compatibility. One of the key features introduced in DirectX 9 was Shader Model 2.0, which included Pixel Shader 2.0 and Vertex Shader 2.0. These allowed for more complex and realistic graphics rendering. It also brought much needed performance improvements through better hardware acceleration capabilities, and better utilization of GPU resources. It also introduced HLSL , which provided
2419-719: The latest DirectX SDK and are preserved for compatibility only: DirectInput was deprecated in favor of XInput , DirectSound was deprecated in favor of the Cross-platform Audio Creation Tool system (XACT) and additionally lost support for hardware accelerated audio, since the Vista audio stack renders sound in software on the CPU. The DirectPlay DPLAY.DLL was also removed and was replaced with dplayx.dll; games that rely on this DLL must duplicate it and rename it to dplay.dll. In order to achieve backwards compatibility, DirectX in Windows Vista contains several versions of Direct3D: Direct3D 10.1
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2478-415: The main goal of Direct3D 12 is to achieve "console-level efficiency on phone, tablet and PC". The release of Direct3D 12 comes alongside other initiatives for low-overhead graphics APIs including AMD's Mantle for AMD graphics cards, Apple's Metal for iOS and macOS and Khronos Group 's cross-platform Vulkan . Multiadapter support will feature in DirectX 12 allowing developers to utilize multiple GPUs on
2537-488: The new features in Ultimate includes DirectX Raytracing 1.1 , Variable Rate Shading, which gives programmers control over the level of detail of shading depending on design choices, Mesh Shaders , and Sampler Feedback. The version number as reported by Microsoft's DxDiag tool (version 4.09.0000.0900 and higher) use the x.xx.xxxx.xxxx format for version numbers. However, the DirectX and Windows XP MSDN page claims that
2596-585: The registry always has been in the x.xx.xx.xxxx format. Therefore, when the above table lists a version as '4.09.00.0904' Microsoft's DxDiag tool may have it as '4.09.0000.0904'. Various releases of Windows have included and supported various versions of DirectX, allowing newer versions of the operating system to continue running applications designed for earlier versions of DirectX until those versions can be gradually phased out in favor of newer APIs, drivers, and hardware. APIs such as Direct3D and DirectSound need to interact with hardware, and they do this through
2655-476: The runtime directly uses Direct3D 9 DDI provided in all WDDM drivers. Feature level 11_1 has been introduced with Direct3D 11.1 . In 2002, Microsoft released a version of DirectX compatible with the Microsoft .NET Framework , thus allowing programmers to take advantage of DirectX functionality from within .NET applications using compatible languages such as managed C++ or the use of the C# programming language. This API
2714-508: The significantly updated DDI, which requires a unified feature set and abandons the use of "cap bits". Direct3D 10.1 introduces " feature levels " 10_0 and 10_1, which allow use of only the hardware features defined in the specified version of Direct3D API. Direct3D 11 adds level 11_0 and "10 Level 9" - a subset of the Direct3D 10 API designed to run on Direct3D 9 hardware, which has three feature levels (9_1, 9_2 and 9_3) grouped by common capabilities of "low", "med" and "high-end" video cards;
2773-573: The video card supports Shader Model 4.1 or higher and 32-bit floating-point operations. Direct3D 10.1 still fully supports Direct3D 10 hardware, but in order to utilize all of the new features, updated hardware is required. Microsoft unveiled DirectX 11 at the Gamefest 08 event in Seattle. The Final Platform Update launched for Windows Vista on October 27, 2009, which was a week after the initial release of Windows 7 , which launched with Direct3D 11 as
2832-558: Was a crucial component of Twitch Plays Pokémon , a social experiment in which thousands of button inputs collected from the viewership of the streaming website Twitch were fed into an emulated version of Pokémon Red . Viewers typed commands into the chat function, which was then fed into the VBA emulator via an IRC bot . They succeeded after 16 days of continuous play, with a peak concurrent viewership of 121,000 and over 1.1 million unique participants. VisualBoyAdvance-M , or simply VBA-M ,
2891-629: Was announced, capable of real-time ray-tracing on supported hardware, and the DXR API was added in the Windows 10 October 2018 update. In 2019 Microsoft announced the arrival of DirectX 12 to Windows 7 but only as a plug-in for certain game titles. Microsoft revealed DirectX 12 Ultimate in March 2020. DirectX 12 Ultimate will unify to a common library on both Windows 10 computers and the Xbox Series X and other ninth-generation Xbox consoles. Among
2950-662: Was claimed to be 50–70% more efficient than DirectX 11 in rendering speed and CPU power consumption. Ashes of the Singularity was the first publicly available game to utilize DirectX 12. Testing by Ars Technica in August 2015 revealed slight performance regressions in DirectX 12 over DirectX 11 mode for the Nvidia GeForce 980 Ti , whereas the AMD Radeon R9 290x achieved consistent performance improvements of up to 70% under DirectX 12, and in some scenarios
3009-609: Was codenamed the Manhattan Project, like the World War II project of the same name , and the idea was to displace the Japanese-developed video game consoles with personal computers running Microsoft's operating system. It had initially used the radiation symbol as its logo but Microsoft asked the team to change the logo. Management did not agree to the project as they were already writing off Windows as
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#17327836653773068-425: Was coined as a shorthand term for all of these APIs (the X standing in for the particular API names) and soon became the name of the collection. When Microsoft later set out to develop a gaming console , the X was used as the basis of the name Xbox to indicate that the console was based on DirectX technology. The X initial has been carried forward in the naming of APIs designed for the Xbox such as XInput and
3127-450: Was included with Windows 95 OEM Service Release 2. Windows 98 and Windows NT 4.0 both shipped with DirectX, as has every version of Windows released since. The SDK is available as a free download. While the runtimes are proprietary, closed-source software, source code is provided for most of the SDK samples. Starting with the release of Windows 8 Developer Preview, DirectX SDK has been integrated into Windows SDK. In late 1994, Microsoft
3186-504: Was introduced for Windows Mobile in Windows Mobile 5.0, replacing the graphics component of GAPI , which was then deprecated. With the release of DirectX version 8.0, DirectDraw was merged into a new package called DirectX Graphics , which extended Direct3D with a few DirectDraw API additions. DirectDraw can still be used by programmers, but they must use older DirectX interfaces (DirectX 7 and below). In June 2010, DirectDraw
3245-429: Was known as " Managed DirectX " (or MDX for short), and claimed to operate at 98% of performance of the underlying native DirectX APIs. In December 2005, February 2006, April 2006, and August 2006, Microsoft released successive updates to this library, culminating in a beta version called Managed DirectX 2.0. While Managed DirectX 2.0 consolidated functionality that had previously been scattered over multiple assemblies into
3304-496: Was officially launched alongside Windows 10 on July 29, 2015. The primary feature highlight for the new release of DirectX was the introduction of advanced low-level programming APIs for Direct3D 12 which can reduce driver overhead. Developers are now able to implement their own command lists and buffers to the GPU, allowing for more efficient resource utilization through parallel computation . Lead developer Max McMullen stated that
3363-400: Was ready to release Windows 95 , its next operating system . An important factor in its value to consumers was the programs that would be able to run on it. Microsoft employee Alex St. John had been in discussions with various game developers asking how likely they would be to bring their MS-DOS games to Windows 95, and found the responses mostly negative, since programmers had found that
3422-541: Was removed from the DirectX SDK package, but in 2012, the DirectX SDK was merged into the Windows Platform SDK, and DirectDraw was included once again. There has been a deterioration of Windows compatibility with old games that rely upon DirectDraw, with Command & Conquer , Warcraft 2 , and Theme Hospital among those affected. In newer Windows versions, some games will refuse to run under
3481-403: Was shortened to Xbox for its commercial name. In 2002, Microsoft released DirectX 9 with support for the use of much longer shader programs than before with pixel and vertex shader version 2.0. Microsoft has continued to update the DirectX suite since then, introducing Shader Model 3.0 in DirectX 9.0c, released in August 2004. As of April 2005, DirectShow was removed from DirectX and moved to
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