Citra is a work-in-progress Nintendo 3DS emulator started in early 2013. Citra can currently emulate, with varying degrees of success, a wide variety of different homebrew applications and commercial software.
If you try some games and run into issues like graphical glitches, freezes and especially regressions from previous versions, you can try reporting them in our issue tracker, accompanied by logs from the emulator if possible. Do not report an issue if a game simply fails to boot entirely.
3ds Emulator Bios File.rarl
In case the PCSX ReARMed core can find no BIOS files named like this in RetroArch's system directory, it will default to a High-Level Emulation BIOS. This decreases the level of compatibility of the emulator, so it is recommended that you always supply valid BIOS images inside the system directory.
The highly-anticipated scripting feature, which has been in development for the past several months, has now been merged and is available in development builds.With this merged, users can now write and run scripts in Lua, as is possible in some other emulators.Currently, there is only preliminary support and many features are not yet exposed.These builds include an example script that shows how to interact with the emulator, and can pull information about the party from the US releases of the first three Pokémon generations.There is also documentation on the current API available on its own page.
A new release of mGBA, version 0.8.4, is available. This version is a bugfix release, which contains many stability and accuracy fixes. Notably, an issue in the 3DS version that would lead to the 3DS crashing when exiting the emulator, and an issue that would lead mGBA to appearing in a language other than English by default on macOS despite the system language being set to English, have been fixed. The previously mentioned bug with Advance Wars is still present in 0.8.4. It has also been discovered to affect Final Fantasy I. This can be worked around by using a dump of the official BIOS, or using a development build, also available on the download page, which has the bug fixed. An extensive list of changes follows after the cut.
eMu3Ds is a fake Nintendo 3DS emulator produced by the 3DSEmulator team. The website claims that it is a closed source 3DS Emulator for the PC that says most games work (and some have full functionality, such as Mario Kart 7). However, the software won't run unless the user supplies a genuine 3DS "BIOS". The site provides a download to these BIOS files, however, it links to a survey. Each time the user does a survey, the owner earns a few cents and most of the time, the download does not unlock. Even after the user successfully downloads the "BIOS" files, the emulator then requires the user to "activate" the emulator using a survey. However, there is no code in the program that checks if the user has completed the survey.
As the program is coded in Visual Basic .NET, you can view the code by using a program called DotNet Resolver. Showing this reveals there isn't actually any 3DS emulator; the menu buttons do not do anything, that the "eMu3Ds" image shown is a simple PictureBox permanently displayed over the program, and that there is no code at all that checks whether or not the surveys have been completed.
There were also rumors that eMu3Ds installs spyware on the users computer, but since there is no install function for eMu3Ds, it renders that very unlikely. However, as it is a fake emulator, you should remove it from your computer as it doesn't do anything. Though if you are suspicious, you can always do a malware scan on your computer using Malwarebytes or something similar.
In January 2015, the main website that hosted eMu3Ds stopped hosting eMu3Ds, and instead now hosts Citra, which is a real 3DS emulator. Specifically, it hosts Citra master-80a040a, which is capable of running The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina Of Time 3D. However, it is always recommended that you use the official website for downloading Citra. Using the official site ensures you always get the latest build, and that nothing nasty will be potentially bundled in with the software. In March 2015, the website began to host eMu3Ds again. Sometime in early 2016 it started hosting old builds of Citra once again, but with adware and spyware bundled in. Therefor, it is highly recommended you avoid
As of right now, there are 4 real Nintendo 3DS emulators; Citra, 3dmoo, XDS, and TronDS. Although 3 out of the 4 can run commercial games, Citra is the best of them all, being able to at least start most games and even play some big commercial games at full speed (3dmoo can only run very basic games, XDS is more so for full emulation rather than actually playing games, and TronDS cannot play commercial games at all.)
This functions the same as input config, but pertains to hotkeys, which are like special buttons controlling the emulator's features (for example, fullscreen, closing the lid, playing a microphone sample, ...).
melonDS uses raw save files, which should be compatible with most other emulators. Note that melonDS determines the save memory type (and thus protocol) from the size of the save file, so it is important that the file be exactly the correct size.
mGBA is an emulator for running Game Boy Advance games. It aims to be faster and more accurate than many existing Game Boy Advance emulators, as well as adding features that other emulators lack. It also supports Game Boy and Game Boy Color games.
The project started in April 2013 with the goal of being fast enough to run on lower end hardware than other emulators support, without sacrificing accuracy or portability. Even in the initial version, games generally played without problems. mGBA has only gotten better since then, and now boasts being the most accurate GBA emulator around.
RetroDeck is an all-in-one emulation solution that uses EmulationStation as its main interface. Because it is self-contained, it will behave as a single app with all of its emulators pre-installed and configured. This is a great solution if you just want a simple emulation experience that you can access directly from your SteamOS environment. Moreover, the app is available as a FlatPak directly in the Discover app via Desktop Mode on your Steam Deck, making the installation process super easy. RetroDeck is in active development and not yet in a final release state.
By default, EmulationStation will prefer specific emulators. To change them out, enter the Main Menu by pressing START > Other Settings > Alternative Emulators and change them as you see fit. These are the emulators I prefer to use with some of the major systems in ES-DE (those that are changed from default are in bold):
PowerTools: PowerTools is a plugin that will allow you to tweak specific emulators and games for the best performance. For example, it works really well with Dolphin by allowing you to reduce the number of CPU threads used by the app from 8 to 3 (be sure to also turn SMT OFF), which will make the 3 threads perform at a higher clock speed and provide smooth gameplay.
The PlayStation can play just fine on RetroArch with all the bells and whistles, but the standalone Duckstation emulator is excellent, too. It also has a sweet radial Quick Menu that can be activated by scrolling the left trackpad near the bottom-left which makes navigation super easy. You can see a demonstration image of a similar menu in the 3DS/Citra section above. Be sure to enable the PS1 controller profile to access the Quick Menu.
Performance and compatibility: Xbox emulation on the Steam Deck is unfortunately not perfect. To see whether a game will be compatible with the Xemu emulator, check out their compatibility list. If the game is compatible, is will likely play at an acceptable level when using an Internal Resolution Scale of 1x (the default set by EmuDeck). Some games may run at a 2x resolution; to set this, press SELECT + START to bring up the Quick Menu, then navigate to Settings > All Settings.
RetroDeck is an all-in-one emulation solution that uses EmulationStation as its main interface. Because it is self-contained, it will behave as a single app with all of its emulators pre-installed and configured. This is a great solution if you just want a simple emulation experience that you can access directly from your SteamOS environment. Moreover, the app is available directly in the Discover app via Desktop Mode on your Steam Deck, making the installation process super easy.
Unless I am missing something, EVERYTHING played through EmulationStation needs to be using the default Steam Deck profile, unless you want to keep swapping back and forth. The emulator-specific profiles only really work if you launch them separately through Steam.
Thanks a lot for this amazing guide! One questions: Is there an option to change the languages for the RetroArch Emulators? I was checking all options but for I have no options for the emulators directly, for example PPSPP. Thanks a lot!
Development versions are released every time a developer makes a change to Dolphin, several times every day! Using development versions enables you to use the latest and greatest improvements to the project. They are however less tested than beta versions of the emulator. 2ff7e9595c
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