How To Setup The Citra 3DS RetroArch Core | PC & Steam (2024)

With the closing of the Nintendo 3DS eShop, it is now more important than ever to know how to setup the Citra 3DS RetroArch core. Nintendo has now made it completely impossible to purchase and download games online on your 3DS console.

It’s unfortunate because the 3DS was home to so many fantastic titles. Luckily for us, a stellar 3DS emulator exists called Citra and fortunately RetroArch has a Citra core that you can download and install.

Citra is the go to solution for 3DS emulators and the Citra RetroArch core is hands down the best 3DS emulator core available. Citra is a work-in-progress Nintendo 3DS emulator started in early 2013 and still updated to this day. Citra can currently emulate, with varying degrees of success, a wide variety of different homebrew applications and commercial software.

You can play games like New Super Mario Bros on any device that supports RetroArch! RetroArch is open source and works on a variety of different devices, including Android, iOS, Windows, Linux, MacOS, multiple consoles, and many more.

This guide will teach you how to setup the Retroarch Nintendo 3DS core and all its available features on your system. Let’s get started!

How To Setup The Citra 3DS RetroArch Core Standalone version?

Download RetroArch

• First, you’ll need to download and install the RetroArch emulator which you can do from the official website here. If you already have it installed, make sure you are on the stable latest version which you can find here.

Get your ROM file ready

• Next, you’ll want to make sure that you have a 3DS ROM available that you can grab and test with. This ROM is the games file that you’ll be playing.

  We won’t be covering how or where to get ROM files here in this guide, but do keep in mind that using ROM files for games that you don’t own and haven’t ripped yourself is illegal.

Using a controller?

• Also, it’s recommended that you have a USB or bluetooth controller handy to use. While not necessary, using a controller is a much better experience than a keyboard or only a touch screen for 3DS games, but you’re welcome to play however you want!

  If you’re in the market for a capable new controller, an 8Bitdo SN30 Pro Wireless Bluetooth controller is a great choice and will only run you about $45 on Amazon.

8BitDo SN30 Pro Wireless Bluetooth Retro Controller

$44.99

1. How To Download The Citra RetroArch Core?

Finding the Citra Core

• Once RetroArch opens, select Load Core

• Next, select Download a Core

Downloading the Citra Core

• After, scroll all the way down until you see the Nintendo 3DS Citra core and click on it to download it

• If RetroArch was already installed on your device, don’t forget to go back to the main menu screen and scroll down to select Online Updater and then select Update Core Info Files and also select Update Databases to ensure that all of your cores info files and databases are all up to date

• After it finishes downloading, you may now press back and then select Load Core

2. How To Load Your 3DS ROM File In RetroArch

Go to Load Content

With the Citra core now installed on RetroArch, we’re ready to load up our 3DS ROM file.

• Head back to the main menu and select Load Content

• Locate where you saved your 3DS ROM on your machine and select it
• The game should now launch and voila, just like that you’re now playing the 3DS on your device

How To Install RetroArch Citra Core on Steam?

To install the RetroArch Citra Core on Steam you will also need to:

• First, right click RetroArch on Steam > Manage > Browse local files.

• Once the Steam folder opens for the RetroArch files, open up the “cores” folder
  
• Next, install the 3DS Citra RetroArch core from the RetroArch buildbot here:
  https://buildbot.libretro.com/nightly/windows/x86_64/latest/citra_libretro.dll.zip
  
• After installing the 3DS core, extract the files from the ZIP folder you downloaded
  
• Open up the extracted folder and copy the citra_libretro.dll file into your Steam’s “core” folder
  
• Next, install the 3DS Citra RetroArch info files from the RetroArch buildbot here:
  https://buildbot.libretro.com/assets/frontend/info.zip
  
• After installing the info files, extract them from the ZIP folder you downloaded and copy all of them into the “info” folder for your Steam version of RetroArch
  
• Next open the Steam version of RetroArch and click “Load Core” to check that the Nintendo – 3DS (Citra) core shows up – if it does, you’re all set
  
• You should now be ready to play some 3DS games on RetroArch in Steam

Additional Citra Core Settings, Options, and Features

Supported Core File Extensions

The Citra core supports the following file extensions:

• .3ds
• .3dsx
• .elf
• .axf
• .cci
• .cxi
• .app

Citra Core Options

Any settings shown with (Restart) means that the core has to be closed and that newly selected setting will be applied the next time the core is booted up.

• Enable CPU JIT [citra_use_cpu_jit] (enabled|disabled)Enable Citra’s ‘dynarmic’ dynamic recomplier. Can improve performance. Instructions that are not implemented by the recompiler fall back into the interpreter CPU core.If disabled, Citra will solely use the Interpreter CPU core.
• Enable hardware renderer [citra_use_hw_renderer] (enabled|disabled)Awaiting description.
• Enable shader JIT [citra_use_shader_jit] (enabled|disabled)Awaiting description.
• Enable hardware shaders [citra_use_hw_shaders] (enabled|disabled)Awaiting description.
• Save hardware shader cache to disk [citra_use_hw_shader_cache] (enabled|disabled)Awaiting description.
• Enable accurate geometry shaders (only for H/W shaders) [citra_use_acc_geo_shaders] (enabled|disabled)Awaiting description.
• Enable accurate shaders multiplication (only for H/W shaders) [citra_use_acc_mul] (enabled|disabled)Awaiting description.
• Texture filter type [citra_texture_filter] (none|Anime4K Ultrafast|Bicubic|ScaleForce|xBRZ freescale)Awaiting description.
• Enable custom textures [citra_custom_textures] (disabled|enabled)Awaiting description.
• Dump textures [citra_dump_textures] (disabled|enabled)Awaiting description.
• Resolution scale factor [citra_resolution_factor] (1x (Native)|2x|3x|4x|5x|6x|7x|8x|9x|10x)Self-explanatory.

By default, the Citra core supports internal cheats, but you have to enable them manually.

How to Enable Cheats on the RetroArch Citra Core

1. Grab a Citra cheats file for your game, you can find a lot of them here (someone took the time to create that list of available game cheats).
2. Put the file ([game_id].txt) in your frontend’s saves/Citra/cheats/ folder.
3. Open the .txt file with a text editor, add *citra_enabled below the cheat title and save changes.

For example, if you wanted to enable the “All Characters” cheat for Mario Kart 7, you would need to edit [frontend_dir]/saves/Citra/cheats/0004000000030800.txt and specifically change the part related to “All Characters” in the file.

You could change this part:

[All Characters, Game v1.0]D3000000 140000000013C99C 01FF003F

To this:

[All Characters, Game v1.0]*citra_enabledD3000000 140000000013C99C 01FF003F

After saving the file, you would reboot RetroArch and start up Mario Kart 7 to see the changes take effect.

If you run into any issues with the Citra core, you can report them to the Libretro Citra team here.

What Games Work With the Citra Core?

Compatible Games for the RetroArch Citra Core

The Citra core isn’t perfect and not every game will play flawlessly, however there are hundreds of games that currently run very well. At the time of writing this guide, there are over 338 3DS games in total that are in the Good and Perfect categories combined with an additional 121 3DS games in the Okay category.

You can check out the full game compatibility list here to see if a game you want to play works well yet.

You should now be all setup and ready to play some 3DS games!

You might also be interested in our guide to setup Citra 3DS emulator for Android or this guide on how to homebrew 3DS.

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