About Citra
What is Citra?
Citra is a work-in-progress emulator for the Nintendo 3DS.
What can it do?
It can currently emulate ctrulib-built homebrew programs, such as Smealum's port of Yeti3D.
Citra is also beginning to run some commercial games, but all are very broken and unplayable.
Can I play <insert retail game here>?
In nice, bold letters: No! Citra is not ready yet!. You can not play Pokémon, Super Mario Bros., or any of your other favorite 3DS games yet.
If you check back in a year or two, this may no longer be the case.
What platforms does Citra support?
We're pleased to say that Citra works on all three major desktop OSs!
Citra is compatible with 64-bit versions of Windows, Linux, and OS X. In the far future, mobile platforms may be targeted as well.
What kind of specs do I need to run Citra?
Citra currently uses an interpreter to emulate the 3DS's CPU, as well as a software renderer for the GPU. As one might imagine, this is very inefficient, so it is doubtful that most (if any!) consumer hardware would be fast enough to run at full-speed.
In short, there's no real recommended hardware, but suffice it to say that you want the fastest possible processor, and a graphics chip that supports at least OpenGL 3.2.
Where can I download Citra?
At the moment, there are no stable versions of Citra for you to download. Soon, we'll make available nightly builds for users to download, but for now you'll have to compile from source. Once Citra has progressed to the point where a stable version becomes viable, we'll make those available for download.
How can I help?
Citra's source is hosted on GitHub, which is a platform where developers can come together on a project, submitting pull requests with code changes.
You probably want to check out the contributor's guide and the developer information. You can look at the TODO list for ideas. Qt or GPU code (make sure to talk to neobrain on IRC first) would be very appreciated at the moment.
You can also chat with us at #citra on freenode. We'll take all the help we can get!
If you can't contribute any code, we also appreciate donations (no matter how small!), which we would use to buy systems and games to test with, or pay for infrastructure and web costs.
