Emulation Azahar re-enables support for .3ds files

LightBeam · Jan 29, 2026

The team behind the Azahar 3DS emulator have decided to re-enable .3ds files. They claim that their original decision led to the creation of forks and an overall fragmentation of the scene they didn't wanted, which is why they've decided to revert that change.

Support for encrypted roms is still not enabled, and there's no plan to enable them, for legal reasons.

placebo_yue · Jan 29, 2026

being politically correct was not worth losing every single potential user out there

The Catboy · Jan 29, 2026

I guess if you can't beat em, join em

OM3GAZX · Jan 29, 2026

About time. That change was absolutely unnecessary.

LightBeam · Jan 31, 2026

Totally, from what I've seen Azahar Plus had slightly better performance anyway ? Not sure why but I might keep using it anyway

botik · Feb 1, 2026

How can I dump EXEFS in order to combine the game and its update? There's only a ROMFS dump.

PabloMK7 · Feb 5, 2026

LightBeam said:
Totally, from what I've seen Azahar Plus had slightly better performance anyway ? Not sure why but I might keep using it anyway

That's fake, it probably comes from a YouTube video where the user doesn't know how to measure performance. In fact you can see in the same video the frame rate being momentarily better for Azahar, but he chose to freeze frame at another point when it shows the fork being faster lol

In any case, not having to do decryption is actually faster than having to do it, but in reality it doesn't matter as it's not the bottleneck.

LightBeam · Feb 5, 2026

PabloMK7 said:
That's fake, it probably comes from a YouTube video where the user doesn't know how to measure performance. In fact you can see in the same video the frame rate being momentarily better for Azahar, but he chose to freeze frame at another point when it shows the fork being faster lol

In any case, not having to do decryption is actually faster than having to do it, but in reality it doesn't matter as it's not the bottleneck.

Thanks for the clarification ! Yeah I took those "benchmarks" with a grain of salt, sorry for spreading a false information and thanks for correcting it

AndeanPuppy · Feb 16, 2026

placebo_yue said:
being politically correct was not worth losing every single potential user out there

I'm not sure any of this has anything to do with "political correctness", as you put it.

Zeroxdz · Feb 20, 2026

That's a good thing, since you can avoid having to modify all your .3ds games to make them compatible. For this reason, I was still using Citra, but it's better to use an application that receives updates. Recently, taking advantage of this change, I installed Azahar.
The problem I've run into is that apparently some of my .3ds games had corrupted headers. Citra ignored it, but Azahar didn't, so I'm downloading .cia versions to replace the corrupted files. However, I've run into a problem: how to convert them to .3ds? Does anyone know how I can do this? All the tools I've found can only convert 3ds to cia, but I haven't found one that converts from cia to 3ds. I don't have much space on my system disk, so I can't be installing .cia files.

LightBeam · Feb 21, 2026

Zeroxdz said:
That's a good thing, since you can avoid having to modify all your .3ds games to make them compatible. For this reason, I was still using Citra, but it's better to use an application that receives updates. Recently, taking advantage of this change, I installed Azahar.
The problem I've run into is that apparently some of my .3ds games had corrupted headers. Citra ignored it, but Azahar didn't, so I'm downloading .cia versions to replace the corrupted files. However, I've run into a problem: how to convert them to .3ds? Does anyone know how I can do this? All the tools I've found can only convert 3ds to cia, but I haven't found one that converts from cia to 3ds. I don't have much space on my system disk, so I can't be installing .cia files.

https://github.com/davFaithid/CIA-to-3DS-Rom-Converter

I just found that but idk anything about it so be careful, other than that .... you're best bet would probably be to make space just for the installation so you can delete the .cia afterwards

botik · Feb 21, 2026

I keep all my games in decrypted .cxi format. Copy and play. And I've already forgotten about .3ds and .cia.

Gemdation · 2026-06-03T14:51:24+0100

placebo_yue said:
being politically correct was not worth losing every single potential user out there

OM3GAZX said:
About time. That change was absolutely unnecessary.

^ true!

I know I'm late to this update since I play on my real 3DS, but I just learned on the Emulation Wiki about the change.

It sucks when a project purposely limits itself to be self-righteous in the name of anti-piracy, especially when it ends up backfiring. I haven't seen much of Azahar Plus but it seems like they cater more towards what is considered copyrighted. Granted, you shouldn't just build an in-app game downloader. In Azahar's case they took off something that the original Citra had which led to most emulator users (pirates, can't brush off that fact) towards Azahar Plus because of Azahar's "act of project philosophy".

This is a little similar to libogc which had NSDK/RTEMS' uncredited code, which led to performative acts such as archiving HBC source code. HBC, as far as I can tell, is left untouched from what is still on Wii consoles. There were people saying that marcan knew about it, discussing if it was even stolen, but I don't care about it to be honest.

The point is that these acts of philosophy, anti-piracy, or whatever, ends up screwing the end user and in some cases even the developers who want to create. Who knows if some people still want to work on HBC and even want to migrate it to libogc2?

PabloMK7 · 2026-06-03T14:54:02+0100

Gemdation said:
The point is that these acts of philosophy

This has nothing to do with philosophy or moral, this has to do with current legislation.

Emulation Azahar re-enables support for .3ds files

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