I've been using New Super Ultimate Injector to overhaul my virtual console library of games on my 3DS, and have found that there's lots of information to be learned and understood if you want to do it properly. The problem is, this information isn't always readily available or easy to find, and is rather niche, so I've had to do some of my own research on things. There are still lots of people asking questions or seeking help with NSUI without getting an answer. And although I don't know everything, I thought I'd just share here what I've learned and maybe it can help other people who are also trying to use NSUI. This guide assumes the use of Beta 28, as that is the latest (and likely the last) version. If any of my information is straight up incorrect, or this guide would better belong in a different forum, please let me know.
For starters, the download links for both Beta 27 and Beta 28 (on this site, at least) are disabled for unknown reasons. But you can find NSUI on Gamebrew or archive.org in either of those versions.
This guide will exclusively cover injecting NES, SNES, GB, GBC, and GBA games. Game Gear is also very straightforward so I won't need to cover it. I'm not sure how Famicom Disk System injection works unfortunately.
Credit to Asdolo, of course, for making this great software.
Banners/Fonts
The closest font to what the official VC titles use for banners is one called "SCE-PS3 Rodin Latin BOLD". Most downloads just give you the regular version of the font, not "bold", but the bold one can be found on github. Should be easy to look up.
You may also notice that the portion of the banner that says "Released: (year)" is down at the bottom of the banner, rather than just underneath the game's title like official games have it. It's also a little more squished. This is a NSUI thing, and if you want to get around it, you'll need to follow the instructions over at this thread to manually change how the lines are spaced and such. This thread also has great info on several aspects of making your banners look good, and how official ones are formatted. It also has a link to a download for SCE-PS3 Rodin Latin "BOLD" that just takes you to the regular non-bold version lol.
A few notable console-specific things with other aspects of the banner. On SNES, NSUI gives you an option to add cartridge images to the SNES' cartridge model. If you go to "Customize... > Cart image > Load cart image...", there appears to be an option to add said cart image. Here's the kicker: this button does absolutely nothing! It seems unlikely this may ever be fixed, but who knows. There may be other ways to manually work around this and add the images yourself, but I wouldn't be sure how.
The default cartridge colors for different consoles are pretty good, but I found that the one for GBA on the 3D console model (which got added with Beta 28) is a little dark. I changed the color to #444444 and it seems to look pretty good and more distinguishable.
Sometimes, you might not be able to download or find the game's title screen in the database. If this happens, you can find very good images of title screens for any individual game on a wiki called "The Cutting Room Floor". If it's a Game Boy game, and you want the title screen to be without color, TCRF doesn't have those images, since theirs are in color. Instead, you can actually go into "Injection options" and hit "Test game". A little emulator will come up and you can pause it at the title screen and take a screenshot. Then, while still leaving the emulator open (you have to so that the temp1 folder we're about to go to doesn't disappear), navigate to the folder that NSUI is in, go to temp1, then screenshots. It will be in there and you can copy it somewhere else and use it as your title screen image. Usually you don't have to do this, as the image will be in NSUI's database. I've only found that I myself have needed to do this for Pokémon Red and Blue, as the title screens in the database for those show a different pokemon besides Charmander/Squirtle (they cycle as you idle on the screen), which just doesn't look as official or iconic.
Alright let's move on to other console-specific stuff.
NES
One thing I've found with NES is that if you're injecting with regular Virtual Console, some games may sometimes claim to be incompatible. Finding a different ROM of the same game always seemed to solve this. This is not the case with incompatible SNES games. They will never work with regular VC, and require emulation. For this reason, because I have OCD and want my injection methods to be consistent across the whole board, I've opted to inject every single one of my games using RetroArch emulation.
Some games that NSUI said were incompatible but worked after I got a different rom:
- Castlevania
- Donkey Kong: Original Edition (worked when I got it off of archive.org)
- Dr. Mario
- Mega Man
- Pro Wrestling
Based on some brief and perhaps not fully exhaustive research/testing, I've found that if you don't want to use official VC injection, Nestopia and FCEUmm are the two most solid options if you have a N3DS, and QuickNES is the best if you have an O3DS (I can't confirm how well QuickNES works though). VirtuaNES appears to be old and inaccurate, according to an emulation wiki. For me specifically, I found that FCEUmm worked better than Nestopia for me due to avoiding a hard crash that Nestopia gives my 3DS when I inject and run Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels (a .nes version of it I found on archive.org that was converted from .fds format). I'm not sure if it does this with every game as I haven't tested yet, but it crashed with Lost Levels. Frankly, it wouldn't make sense for Nestopia to just crash with every game, so see what works for you.
Also, when using FCEUmm, going into core-specific options and setting the sound quality to "high" prevents the "fast forward" feature from working at all. If this matters to you, set the sound quality to "low". I personally didn't hear a difference at all but idk maybe I'm deaf.
I'll use this section to also explain what I know about the "bilinear filter" and "pixel perfect" options for the screen. Basically, old games like these did not have perfectly square pixels. They were slightly stretched in order to fit the aspect ratio of most TVs. The games were never made the way that "pixel perfect" shows. It's just an option for if you really want the pixels to be square, and if you like the slightly sharper look it may give. This is where bilinear filters come in. Due to pixels being slightly stretched as they normally are, the bilinear option offers the ability to kinda "blur" any weird looking inconsistencies that may result from said stretching. A lot of this is personal preference. I myself prefer keeping the aspect ratio to the "recommended" setting, not pixel perfect, and removing the bilinear filter. It looks more clear without it.
SNES
If you're trying to inject using regular Virtual Console, note that these games will not work, at least for the US versions (this is not a full list, these are just from the selection of games I was trying, there are definitely more that don't work, I'm sure):
- Kirby Super Star
- Kirby's Dream Land 3
- Star Fox
- Star Fox 2
- Street Fighter Alpha 2
- Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars
- Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island
From what I know, Snes9X is a very good emulation option, and the one you should choose if you have an O3DS. I can't say how well it runs, however, as I haven't tested it myself. I can say, however, that CATSFC Plus runs horribly, from my testing (unless there's some kind of overclock setting or something that I'm missing).
As stated earlier, the option to add an image to the banner's cartridge does nothing.
When setting default options in NSUI's settings, for some reason SNES specifically will only show Snes9X button mapping options. So if you're using a RetroArch core for your SNES injects and you want special button mappings, you'll have to individually set them for every SNES CIA (unless you're making every CIA back-to-back, in which case your settings persist until the project is closed).
Game Boy
Regular VC injection doesn't have compatibility issues with games, but it does have a really bad color palette issue if you want to add color to your GB games. When you set a palette and test the game, it will badly screw up the palette and placements of colors for several games. I found this in particular with Donkey Kong Land. Some games seemed to look passable, like Pokémon Red. But in Donkey Kong Land's case, colors just looked inverted, and the kongs on the title screen looked demonic. I checked many times to confirm my palettes were the correct ones (I made them based off of the info at this Cutting Room Floor page here.), and indeed, they were correct. So it's definitely a NSUI issue with implementing custom color palettes with regular VC injection.
The solution, of course: emulation! Gambatte is the best choice here (TGB doesn't allow for adding color), as well as for GBC. I've attached a zip folder of my palettes here, which includes palettes you can import into NSUI that give colors to GB games that you'd see if you played those GB games on a GBC. US version of games are assumed, but palettes for other versions can be made, of course. It also includes the default palette that a GBC shows if there isn't a "special" assigned palette to a specific game. My folder includes the official palettes for many of the bigger name games.
A few other things. In Gambatte's core-specific options, be sure to have "color correction" set to disabled. Otherwise, your colors will look really washed out and less vibrant/accurate. Be sure to set "emulated hardware" to GBC, and color to "auto" or "custom". Auto will apply the default green and blue-looking palette (it's the same palette that you get on a real GBC if you hold A + Right on bootup). For any games that have a special palette assigned to them (like the ones in my folder), you'll need to select "custom", then import or manually make your palette. Note that you won't be able to have a special Game Boy border with pixel perfect mode on (from holding Start or Select while booting the game) if you use emulation, as that's only a thing for regular VC.
Note that in Gambatte, I found some Pokémon games like Red/Blue/Yellow to crash when trying to use the save/load state, rewind, or slow motion RetroArch features. More games might do this too. Many also work just fine.
Game Boy Color
I don't think I have too much to say about GBC, really. If you're emulating it, Gambatte is the best choice here too. You can't inject a GB game into NSUI as a GBC game either.
One interesting discrepancy is the fact that Pokémon Yellow is actually a GB game, not a GBC one, despite the fact that Nintendo's official CIA for Pokémon Yellow is a GBC game. If you're using an injected version of Pokémon Yellow, rather than the official one, you'll have to sacrifice the enhanced GBC colors and settle for either the colors of GB or GB played on GBC. My palettes include the one for Yellow too.
Game Boy Advance
GBA games are probably the biggest reason people use NSUI: Nintendo only gave us 10 games. That's not very many. And you can't even get them through normal means unless you mod the system (or, at least, couldn't before the eShop closed).
Beta 28 also adds a really nice-looking custom GBA 3D banner model. All the more reason to use it, unless you wanna stick with the "official" 3D frames Nintendo gave us, that's fine too. That's still an option you can pick. You can even use that 3D frame for other systems too, and customize its color.
Anyways, regular VC injection works very well, and emulation... not as much, at least from my testing. mGBA is the one I went with (I didn't try GpSP). I don't really see a need to change any of mGBA's settings, but it just seems to overall be a more well-known emulator anyway, and we know that it works well. It just doesn't seem to on the 3DS. Similarly to the SNES situation, I'm not 100% sure if it's simply the 3DS hardware being unable to handle the emulation, or some kind of overclocking I neglected to do that is required. I imagine that if mGBA and friends just straight up didn't run well at all, they wouldn't have been put into NSUI in the first place? idk
For the icon, be sure to select "Fit image by width". GBA games differ in this area compared to the other systems due to their aspect ratio. As for the banner, if you're using the 3D GBA model, you don't need to vertically adjust the title screen image at all. If you're using the 3D frame rather than the 3D GBA model for the banner, you can adjust it how you feel is best.
If you're using regular VC injection, the save type for each game must be manually selected. As far as I know, Beta 28 always selects the correct one by default, but I'm not 100% sure if this is always the case (it's never given me any issues), so be sure to verify that it's the right one. There are sites with databases that tell you. If a save type includes RTC in the name, that means "real time clock" which is what saves use to track time in games such as Pokémon Emerald (like for growing berries and stuff).
I stated it earlier too, but I'll mention it here. The 3D GBA banner, just like all others with cartridges, can have its cartridge color customized. I found #444444 to be a more accurate looking shade of gray for the cartridge than the default #323232, which looks a little dark.
Well I think that's it. I may not be able to answer all questions, I'm just sharing what I've found myself. And if any of my information is wrong, again, please let me know. If there's a better forum for me to put this in, let me know too. I just want to help people that are still wanting to use this software but aren't able to find certain information or help with it. Hopefully some people find this useful. I may also update this post as time goes, or update information as I continue my VC project.
For starters, the download links for both Beta 27 and Beta 28 (on this site, at least) are disabled for unknown reasons. But you can find NSUI on Gamebrew or archive.org in either of those versions.
This guide will exclusively cover injecting NES, SNES, GB, GBC, and GBA games. Game Gear is also very straightforward so I won't need to cover it. I'm not sure how Famicom Disk System injection works unfortunately.
Credit to Asdolo, of course, for making this great software.
Banners/Fonts
The closest font to what the official VC titles use for banners is one called "SCE-PS3 Rodin Latin BOLD". Most downloads just give you the regular version of the font, not "bold", but the bold one can be found on github. Should be easy to look up.
You may also notice that the portion of the banner that says "Released: (year)" is down at the bottom of the banner, rather than just underneath the game's title like official games have it. It's also a little more squished. This is a NSUI thing, and if you want to get around it, you'll need to follow the instructions over at this thread to manually change how the lines are spaced and such. This thread also has great info on several aspects of making your banners look good, and how official ones are formatted. It also has a link to a download for SCE-PS3 Rodin Latin "BOLD" that just takes you to the regular non-bold version lol.
A few notable console-specific things with other aspects of the banner. On SNES, NSUI gives you an option to add cartridge images to the SNES' cartridge model. If you go to "Customize... > Cart image > Load cart image...", there appears to be an option to add said cart image. Here's the kicker: this button does absolutely nothing! It seems unlikely this may ever be fixed, but who knows. There may be other ways to manually work around this and add the images yourself, but I wouldn't be sure how.
The default cartridge colors for different consoles are pretty good, but I found that the one for GBA on the 3D console model (which got added with Beta 28) is a little dark. I changed the color to #444444 and it seems to look pretty good and more distinguishable.
Sometimes, you might not be able to download or find the game's title screen in the database. If this happens, you can find very good images of title screens for any individual game on a wiki called "The Cutting Room Floor". If it's a Game Boy game, and you want the title screen to be without color, TCRF doesn't have those images, since theirs are in color. Instead, you can actually go into "Injection options" and hit "Test game". A little emulator will come up and you can pause it at the title screen and take a screenshot. Then, while still leaving the emulator open (you have to so that the temp1 folder we're about to go to doesn't disappear), navigate to the folder that NSUI is in, go to temp1, then screenshots. It will be in there and you can copy it somewhere else and use it as your title screen image. Usually you don't have to do this, as the image will be in NSUI's database. I've only found that I myself have needed to do this for Pokémon Red and Blue, as the title screens in the database for those show a different pokemon besides Charmander/Squirtle (they cycle as you idle on the screen), which just doesn't look as official or iconic.
Alright let's move on to other console-specific stuff.
NES
One thing I've found with NES is that if you're injecting with regular Virtual Console, some games may sometimes claim to be incompatible. Finding a different ROM of the same game always seemed to solve this. This is not the case with incompatible SNES games. They will never work with regular VC, and require emulation. For this reason, because I have OCD and want my injection methods to be consistent across the whole board, I've opted to inject every single one of my games using RetroArch emulation.
Some games that NSUI said were incompatible but worked after I got a different rom:
- Castlevania
- Donkey Kong: Original Edition (worked when I got it off of archive.org)
- Dr. Mario
- Mega Man
- Pro Wrestling
Based on some brief and perhaps not fully exhaustive research/testing, I've found that if you don't want to use official VC injection, Nestopia and FCEUmm are the two most solid options if you have a N3DS, and QuickNES is the best if you have an O3DS (I can't confirm how well QuickNES works though). VirtuaNES appears to be old and inaccurate, according to an emulation wiki. For me specifically, I found that FCEUmm worked better than Nestopia for me due to avoiding a hard crash that Nestopia gives my 3DS when I inject and run Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels (a .nes version of it I found on archive.org that was converted from .fds format). I'm not sure if it does this with every game as I haven't tested yet, but it crashed with Lost Levels. Frankly, it wouldn't make sense for Nestopia to just crash with every game, so see what works for you.
Also, when using FCEUmm, going into core-specific options and setting the sound quality to "high" prevents the "fast forward" feature from working at all. If this matters to you, set the sound quality to "low". I personally didn't hear a difference at all but idk maybe I'm deaf.
I'll use this section to also explain what I know about the "bilinear filter" and "pixel perfect" options for the screen. Basically, old games like these did not have perfectly square pixels. They were slightly stretched in order to fit the aspect ratio of most TVs. The games were never made the way that "pixel perfect" shows. It's just an option for if you really want the pixels to be square, and if you like the slightly sharper look it may give. This is where bilinear filters come in. Due to pixels being slightly stretched as they normally are, the bilinear option offers the ability to kinda "blur" any weird looking inconsistencies that may result from said stretching. A lot of this is personal preference. I myself prefer keeping the aspect ratio to the "recommended" setting, not pixel perfect, and removing the bilinear filter. It looks more clear without it.
SNES
If you're trying to inject using regular Virtual Console, note that these games will not work, at least for the US versions (this is not a full list, these are just from the selection of games I was trying, there are definitely more that don't work, I'm sure):
- Kirby Super Star
- Kirby's Dream Land 3
- Star Fox
- Star Fox 2
- Street Fighter Alpha 2
- Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars
- Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island
From what I know, Snes9X is a very good emulation option, and the one you should choose if you have an O3DS. I can't say how well it runs, however, as I haven't tested it myself. I can say, however, that CATSFC Plus runs horribly, from my testing (unless there's some kind of overclock setting or something that I'm missing).
As stated earlier, the option to add an image to the banner's cartridge does nothing.
When setting default options in NSUI's settings, for some reason SNES specifically will only show Snes9X button mapping options. So if you're using a RetroArch core for your SNES injects and you want special button mappings, you'll have to individually set them for every SNES CIA (unless you're making every CIA back-to-back, in which case your settings persist until the project is closed).
Game Boy
Regular VC injection doesn't have compatibility issues with games, but it does have a really bad color palette issue if you want to add color to your GB games. When you set a palette and test the game, it will badly screw up the palette and placements of colors for several games. I found this in particular with Donkey Kong Land. Some games seemed to look passable, like Pokémon Red. But in Donkey Kong Land's case, colors just looked inverted, and the kongs on the title screen looked demonic. I checked many times to confirm my palettes were the correct ones (I made them based off of the info at this Cutting Room Floor page here.), and indeed, they were correct. So it's definitely a NSUI issue with implementing custom color palettes with regular VC injection.
The solution, of course: emulation! Gambatte is the best choice here (TGB doesn't allow for adding color), as well as for GBC. I've attached a zip folder of my palettes here, which includes palettes you can import into NSUI that give colors to GB games that you'd see if you played those GB games on a GBC. US version of games are assumed, but palettes for other versions can be made, of course. It also includes the default palette that a GBC shows if there isn't a "special" assigned palette to a specific game. My folder includes the official palettes for many of the bigger name games.
A few other things. In Gambatte's core-specific options, be sure to have "color correction" set to disabled. Otherwise, your colors will look really washed out and less vibrant/accurate. Be sure to set "emulated hardware" to GBC, and color to "auto" or "custom". Auto will apply the default green and blue-looking palette (it's the same palette that you get on a real GBC if you hold A + Right on bootup). For any games that have a special palette assigned to them (like the ones in my folder), you'll need to select "custom", then import or manually make your palette. Note that you won't be able to have a special Game Boy border with pixel perfect mode on (from holding Start or Select while booting the game) if you use emulation, as that's only a thing for regular VC.
Note that in Gambatte, I found some Pokémon games like Red/Blue/Yellow to crash when trying to use the save/load state, rewind, or slow motion RetroArch features. More games might do this too. Many also work just fine.
Game Boy Color
I don't think I have too much to say about GBC, really. If you're emulating it, Gambatte is the best choice here too. You can't inject a GB game into NSUI as a GBC game either.
One interesting discrepancy is the fact that Pokémon Yellow is actually a GB game, not a GBC one, despite the fact that Nintendo's official CIA for Pokémon Yellow is a GBC game. If you're using an injected version of Pokémon Yellow, rather than the official one, you'll have to sacrifice the enhanced GBC colors and settle for either the colors of GB or GB played on GBC. My palettes include the one for Yellow too.
Game Boy Advance
GBA games are probably the biggest reason people use NSUI: Nintendo only gave us 10 games. That's not very many. And you can't even get them through normal means unless you mod the system (or, at least, couldn't before the eShop closed).
Beta 28 also adds a really nice-looking custom GBA 3D banner model. All the more reason to use it, unless you wanna stick with the "official" 3D frames Nintendo gave us, that's fine too. That's still an option you can pick. You can even use that 3D frame for other systems too, and customize its color.
Anyways, regular VC injection works very well, and emulation... not as much, at least from my testing. mGBA is the one I went with (I didn't try GpSP). I don't really see a need to change any of mGBA's settings, but it just seems to overall be a more well-known emulator anyway, and we know that it works well. It just doesn't seem to on the 3DS. Similarly to the SNES situation, I'm not 100% sure if it's simply the 3DS hardware being unable to handle the emulation, or some kind of overclocking I neglected to do that is required. I imagine that if mGBA and friends just straight up didn't run well at all, they wouldn't have been put into NSUI in the first place? idk
For the icon, be sure to select "Fit image by width". GBA games differ in this area compared to the other systems due to their aspect ratio. As for the banner, if you're using the 3D GBA model, you don't need to vertically adjust the title screen image at all. If you're using the 3D frame rather than the 3D GBA model for the banner, you can adjust it how you feel is best.
If you're using regular VC injection, the save type for each game must be manually selected. As far as I know, Beta 28 always selects the correct one by default, but I'm not 100% sure if this is always the case (it's never given me any issues), so be sure to verify that it's the right one. There are sites with databases that tell you. If a save type includes RTC in the name, that means "real time clock" which is what saves use to track time in games such as Pokémon Emerald (like for growing berries and stuff).
I stated it earlier too, but I'll mention it here. The 3D GBA banner, just like all others with cartridges, can have its cartridge color customized. I found #444444 to be a more accurate looking shade of gray for the cartridge than the default #323232, which looks a little dark.
Well I think that's it. I may not be able to answer all questions, I'm just sharing what I've found myself. And if any of my information is wrong, again, please let me know. If there's a better forum for me to put this in, let me know too. I just want to help people that are still wanting to use this software but aren't able to find certain information or help with it. Hopefully some people find this useful. I may also update this post as time goes, or update information as I continue my VC project.
Last edited by JDLM,
