------ Thank you so much, Noihs for providing the incredible Fedora-donned rat eating a citrus ------
Many of you may know me through Raikopon - which was a fork of Dekopon, which was aimed at experimental code for the sake of speed & testing purposes. It got a lot of good feedback and the good vibes from many people amongst both this community and Discord made me want to think about 3DS emulation seriously - with better architecture.
I present to you - Raika Azahar - a fork of Azahar - aimed for Nintendo 3DS emulation on the Switch with people running on stock speeds. I know a lot of you overclock your console but I personally do the opposite mostly - run at as low power as possible to conserve battery life. I am sure there are many of you like me out there. Therefore, this is a fork aimed at those people that want to maximize how many hours they get before running out of charge.
The first build of Raika Azahar has already been live for a couple of days now - on the same page as Raikopon. However, I wanted to make a formal, better post here so we can refocus on Raika Azahar and one day, make this the most stable, easy-to-use, feature-rich 3DS emulator for our beloved handheld console.
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What sets my emulator apart from the competition:
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- Raika Azahar is the first 3DS emulator to feature async shader compilation. The work on this continues always. Soon we will have a completely stutter-free experience. The progress from Raikopon v1.0 to Raika Azahar v2.0 has already resulted in a reduction of more than 90% shader compilation time and also less shaders to compile.
- Raika Azahar is also the first 3DS emulator to feature in-device cheat support - you write your cheats directly on the console - no need to open a PC.
- Raika is also the first one to feature a completely customizable screen layout using both touch and controller support. Increase/decrease screen size, move them around, hide, show or change opacity. Rotation per screen will be added shortly as well.
- The first 3DS emulator to feature an in-app updater. A complete, full-fledged updater so you don't have to move away from your Switch to download updates.
- The first emulator to port features from various other forks of Citra-MMJ, Azahar, Tico. If anything else exists on these forks that you want me to port over, feel free to drop a comment below!
- The first emulator to add highly experimental, unique features like Ubershaders, a better FMV Hack for smooth video playback, per-game settings, etc. More will be added as time goes on. I love experimenting around.
- Offer many experimental features but also a feature-rich UI experience.
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Features:
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- Most 3DS games that are aimed at 30 FPS run at full stock speeds at 1x resolution. There are some exceptions which run at horrible performance and require tweaking. I plan on adding an in-device community-driven compatibility poll too.
- True async shader compilation that provides a seamless, good experience while playing games. You will experience some huge stutters at the start of your first boot. These are the biggest hurdle left. After you compile these shaders once, the gameplay becomes infinitely smooth.
- Per-game configuration options so you can make separate configurations for each game.
- Very feature-rich in-game settings overlay that allows you to change many settings and make custom layouts.
- Experimental features from other forks such as Fastmem, Async GPU, Skip Slow Draw, Skip Texture Copy, Skip CPU Write. Thanks Dekopon, Citra MMJ for providing these features. They will be rewritten to provide stability in the future.
- Ability to remap your controls on-the-go. This is one-key only for now. We are going to add multi-key support to these in the future.
- Install CIAs - apps, updates, DLCs right on the emulator.
- Ability to clear shaders on-the-go if you are having visual corruptions. No one likes constantly going to the file manager to delete/edit files.
- Very fast, very lean NXVK | Vulkan backend for Nintendo Switch.
This is only the tip of the ice-berg. We are going to have a whole lot of features in the future! The project is currently in the process of a huge rewrite, as was mentioned in my Raikopon post.
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Latest Version: 2.0.0 | 02/08/2026
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Downloads: GitHub | Releases
Source code: GitHub | Source Code <- This source code reflects Dekopon right now. The current Raika Azahar changes are extremely experimental and will be released as soon as the code has been finalized.
ROMs default location is /switch/azahar/roms/. Default location for emulator is /switch/azahar/. I ask that you keep a separate location for Raika Azahar from your other Azahar forks to maintain maximum compatibility. At max, I recommend separating the shaders and config folders. These will cause conflicts and crashes! There have been a lot of requests regarding keeping a separate folder for save files. I plan on adding that in one of the upcoming updates.
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Recommended configuration:
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- 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.
Please note that I will not be providing any support if you are using cheats or mods. Have a lovely day to all of you!
Last edited by Raibatsu,
