Homebrew Snickerstream - Unified NTR and HzMod streaming client for the 3DS

[HashBrownJM]

Hey, GBATemp is back up! Love the product.

Was wondering if there's any way to add in an equal prioritization of top and bottom screens? Trying to wirelessly stream Pokemon Ultra Moon, and whichever screen I set as priority is AMAZINGLY smooth (especially in the opening cinematic, something I never had on KitKat), but the other screen is quite terrible. (The battle menu has a lot of pulsing light effects that show up pretty awful.)

I understand part of it is an internet strength thing, part of it is a N3DS power thing, but part of it has to be my computer too, no? I have a super powerful gaming PC, so if there's ANY option to have both screens equally weighted and smooth, I'd be indebted. (Although I assume the big issue is going to be keeping FPS up on both screens, right?)

Just trying to figure out how to optimize my settings for maximum clarity.

 

[RattletraPM]

i am trying to use this with a 2ds XL and its not working for me... i keep getting it's not connecting and stuff like that... also is there a discord i can talk to you guys about my issues?

You can add me on Telegram/Discord/etc. if you want. Also I've never thought about opening a Discord server for Snickerstream... I might do that in the future.

Hey, GBATemp is back up! Love the product.

Was wondering if there's any way to add in an equal prioritization of top and bottom screens? Trying to wirelessly stream Pokemon Ultra Moon, and whichever screen I set as priority is AMAZINGLY smooth (especially in the opening cinematic, something I never had on KitKat), but the other screen is quite terrible. (The battle menu has a lot of pulsing light effects that show up pretty awful.)

I understand part of it is an internet strength thing, part of it is a N3DS power thing, but part of it has to be my computer too, no? I have a super powerful gaming PC, so if there's ANY option to have both screens equally weighted and smooth, I'd be indebted. (Although I assume the big issue is going to be keeping FPS up on both screens, right?)

Just trying to figure out how to optimize my settings for maximum clarity.

You can give both screens equal priority by setting the priority value to 0. I don't recommend it because it will impact your overall framerate and most games usually focus on just one screen but if you really want it, then you can do that!
Also, you computer's hardware won't change things much if you're streaming a single 3DS, to be honest. I've tested Snickerstream on a pretty wide variety of hardware and it will also run fine on old and obsolete computers (we're talking 8 to 10 years old!). What's really bottlenecking stuff here is the 3DS itself: not only it has way underpowered hardware but its WiFi chipset only support b/g standards, meaning that the bandwidth is also limited, sadly.

 

[DJPlace]

sent you a request.

 

[shadowla05]

this seems nice thanks

 

[HashBrownJM]

You can add me on Telegram/Discord/etc. if you want. Also I've never thought about opening a Discord server for Snickerstream... I might do that in the future.


You can give both screens equal priority by setting the priority value to 0. I don't recommend it because it will impact your overall framerate and most games usually focus on just one screen but if you really want it, then you can do that!
Also, you computer's hardware won't change things much if you're streaming a single 3DS, to be honest. I've tested Snickerstream on a pretty wide variety of hardware and it will also run fine on old and obsolete computers (we're talking 8 to 10 years old!). What's really bottlenecking stuff here is the 3DS itself: not only it has way underpowered hardware but its WiFi chipset only support b/g standards, meaning that the bandwidth is also limited, sadly.

Would using a USB Wi-Fi adapter to create a local hotspot that only the N3DS is on (as opposed to my regular network) do anything? Or is it really a hardware issue?

 

[RattletraPM]

Would using a USB Wi-Fi adapter to create a local hotspot that only the N3DS is on (as opposed to my regular network) do anything? Or is it really a hardware issue?

A Wi-Fi adapter will help with occasional frame drops (or in case you have a bad router) but that's pretty much it. Everything else is sadly due to hardware limitations.

 

[CyberTails]

I wanted to say that I appreciate this tool (One of the minor things I got my n2DSXL for was to stream my 3DS Screen via SnickerStream to record some 3DS Speedruns). But is there anything that's similar for DSiWare or for DS Carts? (I notice that SnickerStream cuts off after I load Four Swords Anniversary or a DS Cart) and also, Does SnickerStream support Audio or would I have to plugin an Audio Cable to my Headphone/Mic Jack for Audio and configure OBS to record from it?

 

[RattletraPM]

I wanted to say that I appreciate this tool (One of the minor things I got my n2DSXL for was to stream my 3DS Screen via SnickerStream to record some 3DS Speedruns). But is there anything that's similar for DSiWare or for DS Carts? (I notice that SnickerStream cuts off after I load Four Swords Anniversary or a DS Cart) and also, Does SnickerStream support Audio or would I have to plugin an Audio Cable to my Headphone/Mic Jack for Audio and configure OBS to record from it?

1) Sadly won't be able to stream DS/DSi/DSiWare games as the system needs to enter TWL mode for that, unloading NTR from memory.
2) You need a 3.5mm male-to-male cable to stream audio (and a line in/mic input on your PC, mic in does work but line in will give you better quality). Even if NTR doesn't currently support audio streaming I think it would be possible for it to stream audio too but it would kill streaming performance, so considering that using one of those cables won't impact performance at all and they cost literally pocket change I don't think such a feature will ever be coded.

So, yeah. Probably not what you'd have liked to hear but this is how things are.

 

[ShadowtearX]

This sounds quite interesting, how does this compare though in relation to RAM usage on the n3ds opposed to kit-kat v2.0 (2018) which seems to have tossed everything besides the video streaming?

PS, the seperate screens are wonderfull, when i wanted to stream with kit-kat using OBS, i had to 2 times put the source in for top and bottom screen because it was attached to each other

 

[RattletraPM]

This sounds quite interesting, how does this compare though in relation to RAM usage on the n3ds opposed to kit-kat v2.0 (2018) which seems to have tossed everything besides the video streaming?

PS, the seperate screens are wonderfull, when i wanted to stream with kit-kat using OBS, i had to 2 times put the source in for top and bottom screen because it was attached to each other

Both Snickerstream and kit-kat are using NTR on the 3DS so resource usage on the console itself won't change. (As I said before however I want to at least try to add HzMod support, which is another 3DS streaming app, and that might change things around a bit if it'll happen!)

On the other hand, Snickerstream is indeed lighter CPU and RAM-wise on your PC. Not only kit-kat uses a more heavy GUI but it also relies on a separate process, NTRViewer itself, to stream the screens - Snickerstream instead uses a ligther GUI and doesn't need to open another project as the viewer is built in and has been rewritten from scratch!

 

[ShadowtearX]

Both Snickerstream and kit-kat are using NTR on the 3DS so resource usage on the console itself won't change. (As I said before however I want to at least try to add HzMod support, which is another 3DS streaming app, and that might change things around a bit if it'll happen!)

On the other hand, Snickerstream is indeed lighter CPU and RAM-wise on your PC. Not only kit-kat uses a more heavy GUI but it also relies on a separate process, NTRViewer itself, to stream the screens - Snickerstream instead uses a ligther GUI and doesn't need to open another project as the viewer is built in and has been rewritten from scratch!

Thats very good to hear, i'm surely going to use this software from now on.
Thanks allot and good luck on adding HzMOD support! (if it happens ofc :> )

 

[RattletraPM]

Thats very good to hear, i'm surely going to use this software from now on.
Thanks allot and good luck on adding HzMOD support! (if it happens ofc :> )

Hopefully soon™, yeah

Spoiler

Jokes aside, I've just taken an exam today and will be out for a few weeks starting from the 20th of this month, so I can't give a proper ETA on that feature. Not to mention I've done little to no research on that, but what I've seen makes me think it shouldn't be too hard to write a parser for the packets, at least...

 

[CyberTails]

1) Sadly won't be able to stream DS/DSi/DSiWare games as the system needs to enter TWL mode for that, unloading NTR from memory.
2) You need a 3.5mm male-to-male cable to stream audio (and a line in/mic input on your PC, mic in does work but line in will give you better quality). Even if NTR doesn't currently support audio streaming I think it would be possible for it to stream audio too but it would kill streaming performance, so considering that using one of those cables won't impact performance at all and they cost literally pocket change I don't think such a feature will ever be coded.

So, yeah. Probably not what you'd have liked to hear but this is how things are.

I appreciate the reply anyway and I figured about the Audio question I have a combined Audio Jack on my Laptop (and I do have an Male-to-Male Cable) Got any recommendations for Streaming to Twitch with Snickerstream to not impact Performance that much?

 

[RattletraPM]

I appreciate the reply anyway and I figured about the Audio question I have a combined Audio Jack on my Laptop (and I do have an Male-to-Male Cable) Got any recommendations for Streaming to Twitch with Snickerstream to not impact Performance that much?

The main idea is to be reasonable with the remoteplay settings. Mainly:

• You want the quality value to be below 90, anything above it will increase network usage a lot without many visible quality improvements. I'd recommend setting it to a value around 70-80, which further decrease the packet size without producing many compression artifacts.
• Unless you're playing one of the handful of games that uses both screens at all times, make good use of the priority feature instead of disabling it. If you're playing a game that doesn't use the touch screen that much (Pokémon games, for example) set it to 5 or even higher, otherwise 3-4 will do for most games.

If you take the time to fine-tune these two alone you'll definitely get a nice performance bump! Some other general recommendations are:

• Do not set loglevel to 3 unless you need to troubleshoot/debug some issues! It might, and in most cases will, decrease your performance as it logs literally EVERYTHING to a file.
• If you're having occasional frame drops then consider turning the framelimiter on. It will cap your FPS to whaterver you set it to but it will give you an overall smoother stream.
• This should be set correctly by default but I'm telling you just in case you've changed it: do not set the renderer to GDI+ unless you have a very good reason to do so! GDI+ is not hardware accelerated and is basically unsupported at this point (it's included only for legacy reasons). Direct2D on the other hand should be supported on all GPUs made in the last 10 or so years and is hardware accelerated, so there's no real reason to not use it!

Hope this helps!

 

[Strifept]

I finally got this to work and i gotta say it works great!

I read on your github we could make a larger window, but it's contents would remain small. Is there any way to make the contents of the window bigger?

 

[RattletraPM]

I finally got this to work and i gotta say it works great!

I read on your github we could make a larger window, but it's contents would remain small. Is there any way to make the contents of the window bigger?

Yes! Either use the up/down keys while streaming to increase/decrease both screen's scaling or go into the advanced menu and set "Top Scaling Factor" and "Bottom Scaling Factor" to scale both screns separately (remember to click apply afterwards!)

 

[kayef42]

Hi! Not sure if this topic is intended for support, but here goes.

I upgraded my 3DS firmware from 11.6 to 11.7 last night and now streaming games with the NFC patch no longer works. Soon after sending the patch, the 3DS will disconnect from the wifi and not reconnect until after a reboot.

Is this a known problem, or just one with my device?

 

[ImInsane]

Hi! Not sure if this topic is intended for support, but here goes.

I upgraded my 3DS firmware from 11.6 to 11.7 last night and now streaming games with the NFC patch no longer works. Soon after sending the patch, the 3DS will disconnect from the wifi and not reconnect until after a reboot.

Is this a known problem, or just one with my device?

did u try debbuger from Rosalina's Menu?
Because a do this and work perfectly.
If u dont know how, press, L, B and D pad. Go on debbuger option and choose enable.

 

[kayef42]

did u try debbuger from Rosalina's Menu?
Because a do this and work perfectly.
If u dont know how, press, L, B and D pad. Go on debbuger option and choose enable.

Is that the thing where you press X+Y and the menu pops up? When I select "Enable Debugger" on that it says it's already active and doesn't fix anything.

 

[TheRaven81]

So, I downloaded this, and it works - kinda. When it displays the 2 screens inside the window, it's cut off, and I don't know how to fix it. I'm using a New 3DS XL.