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Emulation Guide #13 - Nintendo 3DS with 4k upscaling using Citra

My favourite handheld?  Never owned one - but it has some great games that I have enjoyed through emulation.  The 3DS is worth emulating just for Mario Kart 7; but there are plenty of other games, some clones of previous Nintendo games and some specific 3DS titles that are worth have a look at

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Due to the dual screen format and touch screen not all 3DS games transfer well to PC - but there are plenty that look great.

Citra used to be an absolute pain, when you needed your own (or someone elses.....) 3DS id  to be stored in the roaming apps folder before it would play - a bit like a Bios in other emulators.  Fortunately that is no longer required and Citra is a breeze to setup and get playing  The emulator can be found below.

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Citra website:  https://citra-emu.org/download/

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You will obviously need some games, and there is a link below to Azvarel Retro Gamer's YouTube pages for the 3DS.  3DS games need to be downloaded and formatted correctly to run via Citra and these files have been, I have found the games in other places but their direct compatibility with Citra is not consistent.  These are the major titles for the 3DS, as and when I find another reliable source I will update the page.

 

As always I can't vouch for all of the Roms as I have not tested them all - but Azvarel generally provides fully working Roms. 

 

More generally if you are looking for other options for sourcing ROM files, or off the shelf solutions for emulation and front ends, then consider having a look at my wider games hunting advice - https://www.beanzontech.com/emulation-games-hunting. 

 

Points to note:

General:

  • Citra utilises OpenGL and is processor and GPU dependent - its not the easiest emulator to run and you need a system with some grunt to upscale to 4k.  I'm using a 3600x and a RTX 2060 here.

  • As its OpenGL dependent Citra doesn't play well with Radeon Graphics - Nvidia provides much better performance

Controllers

  • Easy to configure, select the Emulation menu tab, then configure and then controls

Display

  • The default display setting is two screens vertically stacked - to mimic the console itself.  This can be changed by selecting the View menu, display and then choosing your preferred view - mine is Large Screen

Resolution​​

  • As I said above Citra is resource intensive, so my advice is to start a game in Native and the incrementally increase the resolution in game using the Emulation, Configure, Video menu.  I had no issues getting to 4K with my setup in most games.

  • Play around with the other settings should you wish, you won't do any harm - but personally I don't think they add much.

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Pretty straightforward really!  I hope you enjoy the video and the gaming - let me know in the YouTube comments whether you think this was any good and whether you feel that emulating handhelds is worthwhile?

 

Until the next one - Go Well! 

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Azvarel Retro Gamer on YouTube:  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOu56sNffE5cmwpd2ylExGQ

Roms: 

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Each of the above links leads to a webpage with a YouTube video, which shows the content of the further 3 links to a Google Drive - each one of those links contains 10 - 12 games.  You do need to wait for AdF.ly after you follow a link, block pop ups and touch nothing and to the top right you will see a 5 second countdown and then you can click that when it says "Skip Ad".

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Once downloaded you will need to enter the following password to unzip each game - azvarel3ds

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