Hi, I am curious how well GBA and DS games run when they are played through a back-up card such as the M3 or Flash2Advance.

I have always disliked emulators such as VisualBoyAdvance as they don't run at full FPS. For example, I own Mario Kart Super Circuit (among many others) for the GBA, and when I play the rom version on the any GBA emulator, it is noticeably slower/jerkier (nothing to do with frameskip or maxing the CPU) (it seems 50fps compared to 60fps) than the bought cartridge regardless of CPU power (I have a very powerful PC). For some reason in Visualboy GBA games just do not run at their natural frame rate.

Anyway, I wanted to know if roms played on an actual GBA or DS through a flash card run exactly as well as the bought the game.

Thank you.

First, I'm not sure what you mean as to:

Maybe you have not updated your emulator for many years? Or maybe you don't have the minimum PC specs?
Anyway, GBA emulation on a flashcart is full speed, as is NDS emulation on an M3. You can even play old games, such as NES, GG, or GB, at full speed on a flashcart or M3.

Well you must not have bought games on a GBA if you can't tell the difference between emulated games and proper GBA games. Run MKSuperCircuit on a GBA next to any GBA emulator and you'll see. Are a 3.2GHZP4HT and 2gb of ram minimum specs?

Oh, I've owned MK:SC on GBA. And those specs are good enough, so maybe you just got a bad rom dump?

That was just an example. ALL games on the emulator do not run exactly as they should. But for some reason the developers (and players) don't realise it. Visual Boy sucks until they correct this.

Run any fast moving game on the GBA and compare it to the same game running on the emulator if you still can't tell. It's much more sluggish.

Even original Gameboy and Gameboy Color roms don't run at their original framerate on VBA. I have a different emulator for these and it works perfecly. There is still no decent GBA emulator (and I have tried multiple emu's and versions).

I own 2 GBA SPs and I do not notice any difference in the emulator when it is running at 100% speed so if you are having problems make sure you have the latest version and tweak some of the video settings to see if there is any improvment.

I am running on a rather slow machine right now and was using OpenGL at first with the frame skip set to 0. The speed percentage was about 50-70% almost all the time. After changing the Video Render Mode to Direct3D and setting it for Bilinear it now runs at full speed all the time. Another factor that could cause it to seem slow is the frame skip. This is set at 2 by default. Set this to 0 and you should notice a big difference. Based on your PC's specs I would say that the frame skip may acctually be the real problem for you.