Raikopon - a speedy, experimental 3DS emulator for Nintendo Switch (Dekopon Fork)

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Raikopon is now being renamed to Raika Azahar after moving away from Dekopon and being based strictly off Azahar due to performance, stability and architecture concerns. I have asked admin to close this thread as I will open up a new one when that is done. People who are already on Raikopon will still receive updates for the time being using in-app updater.
Post automatically merged:

Emulator has been updated to v2.0.0. It has been renamed to Rai Azahar but it still retains some of Dekopon codebase for now. it will be removed in a future update.

Changelog:
This is a significant shader rewrite. You will have crashes if you don't clear your shader cache after this update.
  • Duplicate shader count has been reduced by up to 90%. This has also reduced the pipeline count by manifold. You will now boot into games much much faster.
  • Significantly reduced dependency on Dekopon codebase and rely more on Azahar itself.
  • Performance bump in games like Ultra Sun/Moon during Z moves - no more drops to half FPS.
  • Removed Arctic support for now.
  • Removed several buggy/redundant settings that would confuse users.
  • Fixed a rare issue where entering cheats menu and entering an empty cheat would crash the emulator.
  • The emulator now exits when exiting a game instead of going to library menu. This is until we completely rewrite the UI.
  • Fixed issue where "." files were causing the file manager to not display entire games or folders.
  • Stability improvements & many more core fixes.
  • Use "sdmc:/switch/azahar/" by default instead of Dekopon. You will need to migrate manually. I would highly recommend keeping separate folders for stability purposes.
Download Link: Releases | GitHub
Post automatically merged:

For those of you having performance issues, here is my definitive way of playing games:
- Turn Async Shader Compilation to ON.
- Turn Ubershaders to OFF.
- Turn Compile Boost to OFF.
- Set Async GPU to OFF.
- Ensure both hardware Shader and Disk Shader Cache are ON.
- Disable Right Eye Render should be ON unless a game demands it.
- CPU JIT should be ON.
- Fastmem should be ON.
- Skip Slow Draw, Texture Copy, CPU Write should be OFF by default unless needed in some games.
- Set "New 3DS Mode" to OFF unless a game needs it. Toggling this option causes huge performance drops in some games.

I cannot help you if you have a custom texture or cheat on and experience crashes. Switch hardware is already very limited and we are pushing it with 3DS emulation running as well as it is right now. It is almost impossible to find and fix issues with custom textures and cheats for me. I will add custom logging in the future. This will help us find and fix issues in individual games faster.
 
Last edited by Raibatsu,
Raikopon is now being renamed to Raika Azahar after moving away from Dekopon and being based strictly off Azahar due to performance, stability and architecture concerns. I have asked admin to close this thread as I will open up a new one when that is done. People who are already on Raikopon will still receive updates for the time being using in-app updater.
Post automatically merged:

Emulator has been updated to v2.0.0. It has been renamed to Rai Azahar but it still retains some of Dekopon codebase for now. it will be removed in a future update.

Changelog:
This is a significant shader rewrite. You will have crashes if you don't clear your shader cache after this update.
  • Duplicate shader count has been reduced by up to 90%. This has also reduced the pipeline count by manifold. You will now boot into games much much faster.
  • Significantly reduced dependency on Dekopon codebase and rely more on Azahar itself.
  • Performance bump in games like Ultra Sun/Moon during Z moves - no more drops to half FPS.
  • Removed Arctic support for now.
  • Removed several buggy/redundant settings that would confuse users.
  • Fixed a rare issue where entering cheats menu and entering an empty cheat would crash the emulator.
  • The emulator now exits when exiting a game instead of going to library menu. This is until we completely rewrite the UI.
  • Fixed issue where "." files were causing the file manager to not display entire games or folders.
  • Stability improvements & many more core fixes.
  • Use "sdmc:/switch/azahar/" by default instead of Dekopon. You will need to migrate manually. I would highly recommend keeping separate folders for stability purposes.
Download Link: Releases | GitHub
Post automatically merged:

For those of you having performance issues, here is my definitive way of playing games:
- Turn Async Shader Compilation to ON.
- Turn Ubershaders to OFF.
- Turn Compile Boost to OFF.
- Set Async GPU to OFF.
- Ensure both hardware Shader and Disk Shader Cache are ON.
- Disable Right Eye Render should be ON unless a game demands it.
- CPU JIT should be ON.
- Fastmem should be ON.
- Skip Slow Draw, Texture Copy, CPU Write should be OFF by default unless needed in some games.
- Set "New 3DS Mode" to OFF unless a game needs it. Toggling this option causes huge performance drops in some games.

I cannot help you if you have a custom texture or cheat on and experience crashes. Switch hardware is already very limited and we are pushing it with 3DS emulation running as well as it is right now. It is almost impossible to find and fix issues with custom textures and cheats for me. I will add custom logging in the future. This will help us find and fix issues in individual games faster.
Big performance improvement here.
I managed to pass the part of the castle that was in Zelda. I'll load my tico save to try other parts
 
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Raikopon is now being renamed to Raika Azahar after moving away from Dekopon and being based strictly off Azahar due to performance, stability and architecture concerns. I have asked admin to close this thread as I will open up a new one when that is done. People who are already on Raikopon will still receive updates for the time being using in-app updater.
Post automatically merged:

Emulator has been updated to v2.0.0. It has been renamed to Rai Azahar but it still retains some of Dekopon codebase for now. it will be removed in a future update.

Changelog:
This is a significant shader rewrite. You will have crashes if you don't clear your shader cache after this update.
  • Duplicate shader count has been reduced by up to 90%. This has also reduced the pipeline count by manifold. You will now boot into games much much faster.
  • Significantly reduced dependency on Dekopon codebase and rely more on Azahar itself.
  • Performance bump in games like Ultra Sun/Moon during Z moves - no more drops to half FPS.
  • Removed Arctic support for now.
  • Removed several buggy/redundant settings that would confuse users.
  • Fixed a rare issue where entering cheats menu and entering an empty cheat would crash the emulator.
  • The emulator now exits when exiting a game instead of going to library menu. This is until we completely rewrite the UI.
  • Fixed issue where "." files were causing the file manager to not display entire games or folders.
  • Stability improvements & many more core fixes.
  • Use "sdmc:/switch/azahar/" by default instead of Dekopon. You will need to migrate manually. I would highly recommend keeping separate folders for stability purposes.
Download Link: Releases | GitHub
Post automatically merged:

For those of you having performance issues, here is my definitive way of playing games:
- Turn Async Shader Compilation to ON.
- Turn Ubershaders to OFF.
- Turn Compile Boost to OFF.
- Set Async GPU to OFF.
- Ensure both hardware Shader and Disk Shader Cache are ON.
- Disable Right Eye Render should be ON unless a game demands it.
- CPU JIT should be ON.
- Fastmem should be ON.
- Skip Slow Draw, Texture Copy, CPU Write should be OFF by default unless needed in some games.
- Set "New 3DS Mode" to OFF unless a game needs it. Toggling this option causes huge performance drops in some games.

I cannot help you if you have a custom texture or cheat on and experience crashes. Switch hardware is already very limited and we are pushing it with 3DS emulation running as well as it is right now. It is almost impossible to find and fix issues with custom textures and cheats for me. I will add custom logging in the future. This will help us find and fix issues in individual games faster.


Because it improves performance when you turn this off:

Turn Ubershaders to OFF.
- Turn Compile Boost to OFF.
- Set Async GPU to OFF.
 
View attachment 582969
Credit goes to Noihs for the picture. 10/10 Fedora.​

EDIT: Raikopon is now being renamed to Raika Azahar after moving away from Dekopon and being based strictly off Azahar due to performance, stability and architecture concerns. I have asked admin to close this thread as I will open up a new one when that is done. People who are already on Raikopon will still receive updates for the time being using in-app updater.


Raikopon is a fork of Dekopon - which is a fork of Azahar - a 3DS Emulator for Nintendo Switch.

I've always wanted to give back a little to the community I have always taken from, so here's my two cents. I forked Dekopon and added a bunch of tweaks from Tico's Azahar. Also sprinkled a bunch of my own changes on top to get so many speed upgrades. I am happy to also share that some of those changes are also ported over to Dekopon (and hopefully Tico soon).
My end-goal with Raikopon is to make a feature-rich, super-fast 3DS emulator that doesn't care as much about accuracy as it does about performance at stock clock speeds.

Features:
- Almost all of the features inside Dekopon are present here.
- Almost true async shader compilation support.
- Per-game settings support.
- FMV video speed hack or movie speed hack - allows you to play games with videos inside them at a nice performance. You can adjust the "Movie CPU Throttle" value to your liking. LDZ likes 25-35%, while Ultra Sun/Ultra Moon like 50-60%. You can experiment and see what works for you. Default value is 45%.
- On-the-fly cheats addition, removal, enable/disable without needing a PC in any way.
- A more refined UX for Settings and in-game. This is actively being worked on, I want to make it look and feel good without losing performance overhead.
- Tons of improvements ported over from Tico-Azahar - thanks Dan.
- Library menu error UI updates to show you if your legitimate ROM backup is valid or not.
- Proper shader compiling at the start of each game to get the best gameplay experience.
- Crash fixes for several games that are not yet a part of Dekopon (hopefully will be added soon).
- And many many more updates coming soon.

If you have any feature requests, feel free to share them here. I regularly update my fork as soon as I get time from my day job. If its within my power, I will definitely get it done.

Latest Version: 2.0.0 | 02/08/2026

Downloads: GitHub | Releases
Source code: GitHub | Source Code

ROMs default location is /switch/azahar/roms/.
You can use Dekopon and Raikopon at the same time, since both share the same tree - I just have a bunch of modifications done on top, and I plan to keep it that way for the sake of simplicity unless our work diverges a lot.
All formats that Azahar natively supports are supported here too.

Different screen layouts can be cycled through via pressing the right stick.
Pressing '+' on a game shows information about it, including updates and dlc.

Enjoy!
Hello quick question, did u manage to fix the freeze during X/Y, ORAS and sun moon bug? Cause no matter what I was doing after 5 mins it was freezing and it was unplayable
 
Why don't you test it and let us know?
Hello, I tested it performance in 2X handlehand is worse than dekopon, but the freeze bug is not there, and the shader compilation is miles better than dekopon seriously there is no comparison!

I just tested ORAS u can play it nicely at native resolution 1200cpu 600gpu and 2100 ram on Oled switch

overall I think I will switch to Raikopon @raibatzu thank u so much for your work!
 
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This has probably been discussed before many times, but when the bottom screen isn't being displayed, just render it in the lowest mode (eg: white frame). This would mean the top frame gets more processing time
 

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