So I've been fiddling around with the settings in VBA-m for about an hour and I just can get the performance of VBA 1.8.

On my desktop I seem to be throttled to around 170% with SVN1097 (multi threading enabled & disabled) when using the speed increase feature but on VBA 1.8 I can reach over 700% increase, both using the Direct3D render API. VBA 1.8 also allows me to disable sound which improves speed further so can anyone shed some light on the sharp performance drop in SVN1097 over v1.8 in this game?

you have enable gba linking ticked in the link menu......

VBA-M | NGOHQ | Post Impact Productions | TNHW | XBCD 0.2.7

....God F@#!ing dammit! Hours spent and wasted yet the solution was a click away. Dunno how long I would've spent before I realised it was ticked, probably more than the amount of time it takes to complete the game. Anyway thank you Squall, I really appreciate the help and the work you put into VBA-m!