The 3DS is most well-known for being the Nintendo console where the first fully 3D Pokémon games were launched, while also offering 3D remakes of old classics e.g. Pokémon Omega Ruby/Alpha Sapphire, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D, etc. These were a delight for newcomers and veterans alike. So if you’re looking to emulate the 3DS, you must have come across the name Citra.
What is the Citra Emulator?
Citra was an open–source emulator developed to run 3DS games. First released in 2014, Citra took a long time to get off the ground and achieve a truly stable state, as 3DS games were miles ahead in terms of graphics when compared to the DS. Nevertheless, Citra was able to work its way up and soon was able to run on relatively older hardware. An Android version was also released on the Google Play Store. Citra was a huge success, mostly because it had no major rival to speak of, but also because of the quality of the emulator. Its excellent optimization, speed hacks, cheats, and especially multiplayer support made it a favorite within the emulation community. Its success and the demand from the fans is what prompted the developers to begin developing an emulator for the Nintendo Switch named Yuzu. READ MORE: How to Play Your Childhood Games on Dolphin Emulator [2024] ➜
↪ Citra’s discontinuation
Now, you might be thinking why we’ve been referring to Citra in the past tense. Well, that’s because, unfortunately, development on Citra has been stopped and its repository on GitHub has also been removed. Why? The answer for this is also applicable in case someone asks why everyone hates Nintendo. For the most part, the developers of Citra, Tropic Haze LLC, had moved on to Yuzu. While some developers continued working on Citra, most of the team was focused on Yuzu. However in March 2024, Nintendo filed a lawsuit against Tropic Haze LLC accusing them of “endorsing piracy and making profits off of their expense”. Since Tropic Haze LLC was a team of developers who worked on Yuzu and Citra as a hobby and only took donations, they agreed to a settlement with Nintendo where they would stop development on all projects related to Nintendo, in exchange for not being fined. And thus, this marked the end of Yuzu and Citra both.
The State of 3DS Emulation
Although Citra shut down around 5 months ago, there aren’t as many successors to it like its sister project Yuzu. One major cause for this is that most 3DS games were functional and, for the most part, playable from the start till the end without any major issues. The few that weren’t, were not popular titles, or were ported titles that you were better off playing using another emulator for another console. READ MORE: The Best Nintendo DS Emulators in 2024 for All Games ➜
How To Play Games on the Citra Emulator
While development on Citra was abandoned by the original developers, with the GitHub page also being removed, that doesn’t mean you still can’t get it. Its well-known that once something is uploaded to the Internet, it can never be completely removed and Citra is no exception. Also make sure to copy all your 3DS games to a single folder. Without further ado, let’s get to it.
↪ Running Citra on desktop
READ MORE: What’s the Best Game Boy Advance Emulator Out There in 2024 ➜
↪ Getting the Citra emulator on Android
The process to download the Citra emulator on Android is very similar to the desktop process. When Citra was discontinued, it was removed from the Google Play Store. But like the desktop version, Citra Android lives on the Internet Archive. Simply search for it there, download the APK file, install the app, copy your games on to your phone, watch a YouTube tutorial for the best settings and you’re good to go!
Citra vs. Competitors
Although Citra shut down around 5 months ago, there aren’t as many successors to it like its sister project Yuzu. While Yuzu has seen a number of successors due to new games being added to the Switch’s library, Citra has only 1 successors; Lime3DS. Lime3DS is essentially using the same code as Citra, since it was an open-source project. However, it still suffer from inconsistent performances here and there. Hence, most players still prefer to use Citra. That is not to say, that Lime3DS is all bad, as the developers are working hard to make the project better. READ MORE: The Ultimate Guide to Vimm’s Lair – Classic Games & ROMs ➜
Conclusion
While Citra and Yuzu may have shut down due to legal action taken by Nintendo, it doesn’t mean that emulators are illegal. Emulators are completely legal, and this shutdown seems to have place the emulation community on high-alert into archiving and open-sourcing their projects. By doing so, their projects continue to live on, if the worst comes to pass. At any rate, its time to wipe the dust off all those 3DS CDs and play through some of the finest of Nintendo’s games with Citra!
