Eventually, VBA-M was created, which merged several of the forks into one 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. VisualBoyAdvance-M, or simply VBA-M, is an improved fork from the inactive VisualBoyAdvance project, adding several features as well as maintaining an up-to-date codebase.
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. 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. The VisualBoyAdvance project was started by a developer under the online alias 'Forgotten'.