Citra

Description

In early 2014, there were some Nintendo 3DS emulators. Up to now, only one of them still in-progress. And that is none other than Citra. Currently, Citra can emulate some of 3DS’s homebrews and a few games. Let see what can it bring to us – the-gamers-who-don’t-have-enough-money-to-buy-a-real-3DS-to-play-games.

Features

Some information about Citra

• The developer team of Citra has over 50 members. They are software engineers, students, coders… even some of them are just contributors.
• Citra has been written in C++ – a modern programming language. This language allows developers to customize, add or remove many functions they want.
• Citra supports three operating systems: Windows, OS X, Linux. On Windows, only the 64bit version is acceptable. They officially have no plans to support the 32bit version.

About playing games with Citra

• Yup, the most wanted point of Citra is using it to play 3DS games, especially are Pokemon games like X/Y/Omega Ruby/Alpha Sapphire. Well, up to now, those games are not fully playable yet. Like I have mentioned above, Citra is a work-in-progress emulator from 2014, that means there will be a lot of things to do from now on.
• You can see some videos about using Citra to play games on YouTube. That’s right, but those are unofficial branches… not the official one of team Citra. Other builders and coders want to test Citra soon, so they build a version of themselves. If you want, you can use those unofficial builds to test games. Remember, team Citra won’t support you if they know about your unofficial version.
• One more thing, your devices – PC, laptops – must meet these requirements to use Citra: a VGA supports at least OpenGL 3.3 and a 64bit version (in this case, Windows will be the most suitable selection). The CPU is also important, please select the fastest one in your finance condition. Even when you don’t have a strong VGA, you can still use a software implementation of OpenGL like Mesa. Please notice that this method will be much slower than a real VGA.
• Before using Citra, please prepare some games by dumping game catridges. Citra developers don’t suggest you to download games from the Internet and play (even so you can do if you want). Instead, use a real 3DS and dump games yourself. The instructions can be found on team Citra’s homepage, check it out.

Some technical problems when using Citra

• When getting the “Failed to Decrypt Error” notification, check if you have decrypted it or not. Remember that Citra will use the “.cia” format for its standard.
• Many games will not load with these problems: black screen, only the title screen, freeze, crash. If they can run, you will only get a slow speed with many graphical glitches.
• When Citra crashes after starting a game, try to update your graphics driver to the latest version. After that, check whether you have installed the Visual C++ Redistributable or not. If not, install these versions to make sure that you cannot miss anything: 2005 – 2008 – 2010 – 2012 – 2013 – 2015 (both in 32bit and 64bit, you can find on Microsoft’s website).