Homebrew How hard would it be to port the Link to the Past PC port to 3DS?

[Heaaa]

I know it's already been ported to switch and I'm wondering how difficult it'd be to put it on 3DS. Would the code have to be significantly altered to run on 3DS since it's already C/C+? I'm willing to port the game over myself but I need to know what I'll have to learn before doing so. I have no prior experience in coding so I'm already getting into learning c++; but will I also need to understand the 3DS more extensively?

 

[K0rbo]

will I also need to understand the 3DS more extensively?

Yes.

 

[Coderman64]

A quick look at the dependencies suggests that it mostly just requires SDL2, which is available for the 3DS. Do note that the 3DS version of SDL2 only supports software rendering (dunno if the switch version has hardware support yet). So a port is probably possible. Probably.

You might also need to do some optimizations to get things running at full speed (because a 3DS is, of course, much slower than a switch), which may require a more comprehensive knowledge of 3DS hardware and limitations.

 

[ghjfdtg]

I don't see why it would not run fine even on old 3DS. There is just a tiny catch and that is the code. To run on other platforms i assume they had to port the game engine and how well the game runs will depend on how optimized this port is. I would say give it a shot.

 

[Coderman64]

Here's a build of a quick and dirty port using software rendering. It seems to run slow, both on my o3DS and Citra.

Note that this does not include the zelda3_assets.dat, which needs to be extracted from your own (legit) ROM. Check out the original repository for more information on how to extract that.

to run, extract the zip into your /3ds/ folder, and place zelda3_assets.dat there as well. You also need to make sure your DSP firmware is dumped, or it will insta-crash.

If you want to use Citra, place the zelda3.ini file at the root of the virtual SD card, since Citra looks for it there for some reason.

To get it running at full speed, you'd probably need to re-implement the renderer using something like citro2d/citro3d for hardware acceleration.

Honestly, at this point, there is hardly any benefit of doing this over using snes9x, other than (somewhat janky) widescreen support.