Visual boy advanced emulator runs too fast
I just got the visual boy advanced emulator 1.8.0 but it runs at 125% - 200% too fast, and if I throttle it to 100% the sound goes real slow.
Solution 1:
This has been a launchpad issue for the last few versions of this particular emulator.
Suggestion would be to use an alternative emulator such as Mednafen (install from software center)
Solution 2:
There is an alternative called VBA-M which doesn't have this problem and features easy-to-use GUI. You can get a pre-compiled package from PlayDeb (as of October 2014, available for any Ubuntu version between 10.04 and 14.10). It should work in older hardware as well.
Alternatively, you can try RetroArch with VBA core, which appears to be based on newer versions of VBA-M. Pre-compiled packages are available for Ubuntu 12.04 through 14.04 in hunterk PPA. The package name for emulator is "retroarch" and VBA core is either "libretro-vba" or "libretro-vba-next", depending on your Ubuntu version.
Note that hunterk PPA has been deprecated. If you are using Ubuntu 14.04 or 14.10, please use the Libretro team's PPA instead. The VBA core package is named "libretro-vbam" in there.
Its GUI is rather primitive and doesn't let you customize keyboard settings. To change the key mappings, edit the config file located in ~/.config/retroarch/retroarch.cfg (created automatically after run once) directly using any text editor.
RetroArch's default OpenGL renderer requires fairly new video card so it may fail to function. (It worked well in my newer PC with NVidia video but not on my older Intel one) If that's the case for you, create a new file in ~/.config/retroarch/retroarch.cfg (delete it first if this file already exists; create directories if they don't exist) and put the following line in the file:
video_driver = "sdl" (or video_driver = "xvideo")
and start the emulator directly from the command line (because there are no GUI outside of GL renderer):
retroarch --libretro /usr/lib/libretro/vba_next_libretro.so /PATH/TO/ROM.gba