3DS emulation on the Switch in 2022 (2024)

https://www.patreon.com/m4xwdev

ITS been a while for me but some games perform somewhat playable ( Not Stiftering but Sometimes Bad quality or slow gameplay )

burningessentialoils said:

I remember seeing a Youtube video from 2020 or 2021 where someone was explaining that if you subscribe to a certain developer's patreon you will get access to a 3DS emulator which performs well with a slight CPU overclock. Has it improved over time? How is the game compatibility?

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It hasn't really been updated in quite some time and game compatibility is not all that great.

mrcroket said:

I won't support a patreon with "exclusive" access for a open source emulator. I mean, it's okay to have a way for receive "thank you payments", but not force the peoplo to pay for access to software that he don't own.

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Well he somewhat "owns" the port for Horizon OS. It's not like he just cloned a github and had to run one command to create the citra.nro file. He definitely put some efford into it and thus it's fine imho.
You are always free to get yourself the code of Citra since it's open source as you said and do your own port while keeping it public. If you can't or don't want to, you can either pay for m4xw's port or live with the fact that you can't play 3DS games on your Switch yet. He said he'll make it public when he's done with it though.

That being said, you all should be aware that it's nowhere enjoyable in it's current state. Very few games run "okay" but it's no fun and definitely not "the way the games should be played" and honestly I don't see much happening there from now on. m4xw is a brilliant dev but he's not a magician and the Switch is very limited which is a fact we all have to accept. Unless a Switch Pro or 2 comes out, those games won't run significantly better.

The only hope I see for 3DS gaming on the Switch is the approach that vita2hos took a few days ago: Redirecting all syscalls to Horizon OS and thus play the games natively instead of emulating them. Pretty much the same way WINE runs Windows binaries in Linux.

lordelan said:

Well he somewhat "owns" the port for Horizon OS. It's not like he just cloned a github and had to run one command to create the citra.nro file. He definitely put some efford into it and thus it's fine imho.
You are always free to get yourself the code of Citra since it's open source as you said and do your own port while keeping it public. If you can't or don't want to, you can either pay for m4xw's port or live with the fact that you can't play 3DS games on your Switch yet. He said he'll make it public when he's done with it though.

That being said, you all should be aware that it's nowhere enjoyable in it's current state. Very few games run "okay" but it's no fun and definitely not "the way the games should be played" and honestly I don't see much happening there from now on. m4xw is a brilliant dev but he's not a magician and the Switch is very limited which is a fact we all have to accept. Unless a Switch Pro or 2 comes out, those games won't run significantly better.

The only hope I see for 3DS gaming on the Switch is the approach that vita2hos took a few days ago: Redirecting all syscalls to Horizon OS and thus play the games natively instead of emulating them. Pretty much the same way WINE runs Windows binaries in Linux.

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is what I've always wondered. Why has no one created a virtual environment that runs console firmware on other consoles with the same architecture or compatibility on the same?

In itself, the emulators that we know apart from emulating the console's CPU virtualize the firmware or called "bios". At least that's what happened with GameCube on Wii with IOS and Wii with vWii on WiiU.

Imancol said:

is what I've always wondered. Why has no one created a virtual environment that runs console firmware on other consoles with the same architecture or compatibility on the same?

In itself, the emulators that we know apart from emulating the console's CPU virtualize the firmware or called "bios". At least that's what happened with GameCube on Wii with IOS and Wii with vWii on WiiU.

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The problem is that the consoles (specially olds ones) have a very custom chips with unique functions and also very specific low level optimizations that can't be translate directly to another console, even if this console have the same architecture. For example, the og xbox have a x86 cpu and a nvidia gpu, both chips have an equivalent on PC, but because the customizations on the xbox version of the chips, there is not a easy way to emulate (or in this case virtualizate) the xbox software on PC.

The wii u case is different beacuse wii have native compatibility with gamecube (wii is just a vitamined gamecube) and the wii u have nativa compatibility with the wii.