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Would someone be able to give me a TL;DR or lead me to a guide of this or something? Thanks.
The reply above this one tells pretty much everything important you need to know, except rtcom.
You said you can figure things out, but since you said you're new to the 3DS scene, I'll try to be as explicit as possible within sensible limits.
Find the last puu.sh link a few pages back which is the latest version containing a lot of patches. Install it with a .cia installer, like FBI (which you can install first time with the H&S inject method if it's not mentioned in the 3ds.hacks guide).
After installing the .cia and opening the patcher, you'll be greeted by a filter list. I made a scale hardware emulator which updates the background image in real time (at <1FPS, making the GUI laggy as hell), so you can see how each filter would look like. You can hold X and release X to see the difference between Nintendo default and the highlighted scale filter.
If you found the right puu.sh link, it should have a text on the bottom screen saying that you can press Y+B to open the patch menu. I'll highlight the more important ones:
- GPU scaling: you lost the ability to use filters, and it's blurry as hell, but it's a really-really high quality blur
- wide: it's just widescreen
- DPAD patch: allows you to press UP+DOWN and LEFT+RIGHT
- rtcom: long story short, it's a hack of abusing support hardware to open an extremely slow communication pipe between DS ARM7 and 3DS ARM11, allowing access to ARM11 hardware, like gyro
- CTR_Redshift: it's a blue light filter; it's like f.lux ported to the 3DS
On the filter selector screen, highlight the filter you like the most and press START to begin the compression process. Long story short, the original binary has to be decompressed before patching, and has to be re-compressed due to software and space constraints.
After compression, and if you're using Luma the first time, power off your 3DS, then power on holding SELECT until the config menu pops up. Enable "enable game patching and FIRM loading" and press START to apply settings. This only has to be done once.
Now after booting into a DS(i) game, the patches should be working.