Many independent developers continued to improve the emulator, but they had no form of unison in order to release the emulator in one place. After version 1.8 beta 3 in 2004, development of VBA stopped.

However, after the first release, development of the emulator was handed over to the VBA team. VisualBoyAdvance was started in 2004 by Forgotten. Visual Boy Advance (sometimes formatted as VisualBoyAdvance, and often abbreviated to VBA) is a Game Boy, Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance emulator for Microsoft Windows, Mac OS, Linux, BeOS, and many other operating systems. VBA is often used to take screenshots of games for websites such as this for Pokémon FireRed.