In the last quarter, we’ve further improved the speed and accuracy of citra along with supporting more 3DS features, and we are very excited to show what we’ve been working on. It’s a bit hard to believe, but Citra is already three years old, and in these three years we’ve gone from an emulator that could barely run homebrew, to one that can run many commercially available games at playable speeds!

As we approach the first birthday of Citra’s website, we’d like to announce yet another project infrastructure update: We’ve decided to launch a new forum based on the Discourse forum software! When we first introduced the new website back in February of 2016, we chose to use Flarum over more classic forums used on other websites (such as phpBB, MyBB, or vBulletin). The reason for this was because Flarum was a much more modern platform, with better mobile support, and a attractive and innovative UI.

As you all know, the Nightly builds have been down for some time now due to the former maintainer not being around, but the issues have been resolved, and the Nightly builds are now available on our downloads page once again! With downloads available for Windows, macOS, and Linux, you’re no longer required to compile the build yourself. Likewise, we’d like to remind all users that any bugs found within Citra, or during emulation, be reported from the Nightly builds, and not the Bleeding Edge ones.

DISCLAIMER: You do NOT need to follow this guide if you downloaded Citra for the first time after December 6th, 2016 OR if you have freshly installed Citra since using an older build. In new versions of Citra, the location of saves has changed, so this guide will show how to migrate your saves to the new location on Windows (Linux and macOS Bleeding Edge builds are planned, we are currently busy working on bringing nightly builds back.

Sometimes it’s hard to wait. We’ve noticed that users are very excited about the future of Citra, which means wanting to try all of the changes all of the time. But, emulator development can be a slow, arduous process as new changes can bring big regressions and problems with the much wanted new features. In order to satiate the needs of our users, we’ll be adding new builds for download: bleeding edge builds!

If you haven’t heard of Discord yet, it’s basically an alternative to Skype, featuring servers with both voice and text chat. You can use it in your browser, download the desktop program, or get the mobile app. If you don’t have an account already, you can make one for free here. Once you’ve done that, you can join Citra’s official server by going here. There are 5 channels: #read-first - A read-only introduction to the server, and announcements.

Special thanks must be given to fincs and the rest of the 3DS community for their work reverse-engineering the DSP firmware. Without that work, Citra would not be this far with audio emulation. As of May 19th, 2016, Citra now has preliminary High Level Emulation (HLE) audio support! This means that users playing on Citra no longer have to listen to the deafening sound of silence in many titles. To get to this point was a huge reverse-engineering effort done by multiple people, with much of the reverse-engineering and the final implementation for Citra coming from MerryMage.

One of the big things everyone has been wondering about Citra is when it will be able to render games at HD resolutions. One of the great things about emulators is that they can surpass the limitations of the original console, especially when it comes to graphical fidelity. With the 3DS specifically, many beautifully detailed games are hidden behind staggeringly low resolution screens topping out at 400x240. With Texture Forwarding (from tfarley, based on yuriks early implementation), Citra can now output games at any resolution, and runs faster as well!

Welcome to the first Citra Progress Report of 2016! While 2015 will be considered the year that Citra first played games, 2016 is quickly shaping up as a year filled with higher compatibility, greater stability and much more as Citra matures. The avalanche of new features from tons of contributors has made it hard to keep up with everything even for developers! Because there have been so many changes and there are so many different games, it can be very hard to keep up with what is working and what is not.

This month we bring you the second installment of our two-part progress report on Citra in 2015! With this part, we discuss the evolution from Citra being able to barely run a few commercial games at a few frames-per-second, to where it is in 2016: Running many retail games at reasonable speeds, some of which are fully playable with near flawless graphics! We discuss Citra’s new “dyncom” CPU core, the OpenGL renderer, per-pixel lighting, and various bug fixes.