Hacking EmuNAND 9.4 slow?

[Maximilious]

The point though, is that it will never be the same speed as before even with a brutal SD card. I know, I bought one way back to avoid Gateway startup crashes... and while my speed at booting is faster than of my wife's 3DS with a normal SD, it STILL is unoptimized as hell. Nintendo just needs to get their crap together... but they are probably banking on the N3DS and won't fix this for 3DS.

I'd gladly give up theme's (I've even purchased some) to go back to 8.x. Games still work great, but the extra 15-25 seconds to boot is really annoying when it used to boot in less than 5.

 

[thorasgar]

I wonder if this has anything to do with the size and or amount of free space on the card as well. I have read that larger SSDs and leaving about 25% free makes them much faster. Could be apples and oranges for all I know.

 

[nosignaldetected]

so this is why they try to kill old 3ds. apparently the upcoming firmwares will probably be optimized for new 3ds.

if so then it hasnt happened yet

i have a new 3ds xl, and the loading time for the system menu is the same as on the original model

 

[tony_2018]

Hm....I guess its about that time to install that 64gb class ten sd card I kept as a spare, or I can use the 32gb class ten. How easy is it to copy data over to the new sd w/o GW?

 

[Maximilious]

Hm....I guess its about that time to install that 64gb class ten sd card I kept as a spare, or I can use the 32gb class ten. How easy is it to copy data over to the new sd w/o GW?

I'm pretty sure I was able to just copy/paste the data on a Windows PC from one to the other. I had to backup my 2GB SD card a month or two ago and transfer to a 16GB for an eShop purchase and I think that's how I did it. As for emuNAND and all that I'm not sure sicne I don't have one yet, but the DS part was copy/paste.

 

[tony_2018]

Good, I'll begin that process now. Thanks!

 

[Nurio]

The best way I found to reduce slowness is to get a faster SD card. Ever since I got my 64GB card for my EmuNAND, it's been a LOT faster. It loads almost instantly.

Hmm, interesting. I'll keep that in mind, thanks!

You need a faster SD. People complain of lag sometimes during games, even with their Gateway mSD, because their speeds are too slow. Note that this doesn't include lag related to playing Pokémon battles in 3D, as that comes down to shitty code optimization in an effort to release the game before Christmas and get more revenue.

If possible, try to get a class 10 one that has enough space for CIAs (if you want that). If your mSD cart already is huge, like mine (I have 64 GB class 10), then 8 GB will probably suffice (just make sure you get a fast one).

Yep as other people have already said, get a faster sd card preferably class 10 and you'll notice the difference.

No issues at all with my SanDisk SD card 3DS XL Pal 4.5 gateway emunand 9.4

Sometimes when i do the DS exploit, instead of booting into gateway mode I just get a black screen.. it only happens sometimes though

does anyone else have this issue?

Not exactly related to the topic, but this is 'normal'. Any Gateway on any 3DS has this issue from time to time. You should've seen when Gateway was still new, the chances of it properly loading were abysmally low.

It's pretty cringe worthy how it takes ages to load the menu even if you don't have any theme applied You would think that if they couldn't implement themes without adding the annoying slowdown, they would make them an optional feature.

Say, wouldn't it be feasible for hackers or GW to find a way of disabling them?

I don't know if it's feasible right now. Apparently not everyone is noticing these slowdowns and they can be fixed by having a faster SD card. There are probably issues with a higher priority at the moment.

My 4.5 XL on 9.4 emunand takes 4-5 secs for the menu to fully loadup. My N3DS XL is pretty much instant.

so this is why they try to kill old 3ds. apparently the upcoming firmwares will probably be optimized for new 3ds.

Yeah my original 3DS is slow as a dog to turn on now. Very annoying. Just like Apple - We'll let all devices run any iOS, oh you're on old hardware, time to upgrade! Onto N3DS. Seriously just a business ploy imo.

Alright. Somewhere I'm not surprised. The N3DS is much more capable and I can indeed imagine that Nintendo is now simply optimizing the code for the N3DS and having the old 3DS as an afterthought.

I haven't noticed any slowdowns over previous firmwares. I'm using themes as well. If the SD card has anything to do with it, here's mine:

32GB SDHC UHS-I Class 10 SanDisk Ultra formatted to 64KB clustering.

I don't use an EmuNAND.

I assume you use a Sky3DS then?

I'd gladly give up theme's (I've even purchased some) to go back to 8.x. Games still work great, but the extra 15-25 seconds to boot is really annoying when it used to boot in less than 5.

I hear ya. I hear ya. I am contemplating using my 8.1 EmuNAND backup to go back to 8.1. I'll be losing some progress here and there but it might ultimately be worth it... What do you (or anyone else) think?

I wonder if this has anything to do with the size and or amount of free space on the card as well. I have read that larger SSDs and leaving about 25% free makes them much faster. Could be apples and oranges for all I know.

Not an unreasonable hypothesis. I think there might be some truth to this. Even on SD cards, things get fragmented, and the more full and more fragmented the SD card is, the more it has to seek for free spaces to write to and seek to find the right data.

Hm....I guess its about that time to install that 64gb class ten sd card I kept as a spare, or I can use the 32gb class ten. How easy is it to copy data over to the new sd w/o GW?

I'm pretty sure I was able to just copy/paste the data on a Windows PC from one to the other. I had to backup my 2GB SD card a month or two ago and transfer to a 16GB for an eShop purchase and I think that's how I did it. As for emuNAND and all that I'm not sure sicne I don't have one yet, but the DS part was copy/paste.

For the EmuNAND, you need to use EmuNAND tool. (Google/Search it. It's a thread here on GBAtemp.) You should backup the EmuNAND from your old SD card. Then format EmuNAND on the new SD card. (I know you said "without Gateway", but you do need Gateway for that step.) And then simply reinsert the EmuNAND backup to the new SD card.

 

[tony_2018]

WHOA@@@@!!!!

Hold on, I'm not in the inner circle yet w/ GW. I'm waiting on that release. Til then, I notice no improvements after the sd card swap.

 

[TecXero]

I assume you use a Sky3DS then?

Nope. Someone mentioned a difference in the performance under the real NAND as well, so I decided to share my experience. I don't use a 3DS flashcart yet, I'm still fine using a DS flashcart.

 

[Maximilious]

I hear ya. I hear ya. I am contemplating using my 8.1 EmuNAND backup to go back to 8.1. I'll be losing some progress here and there but it might ultimately be worth it... What do you (or anyone else) think?

If your sysNAND is 4.5 and emuNAND is 9.x, I'd definitley roll back to 8.x. Themes are cool, but they really don't do anything for the old 3DS. N3DS is going to have snap kits for themes you buy so they make a little more sense on newer systems. And all of the new games to this point work on 8.x that I'm aware of, so there's really no drawback on rolling back if you can for a better experience. I wish I had that ability but all is lost for my 3DS, oh well.

 

[Sabregod]

Are most people here preferred using exFAT or FAT32? Any issues or experiences with using either of them?

 

[Maximilious]

Are most people here preferred using exFAT or FAT32? Any issues or experiences with using either of them?

I would not use exFAT, there's very limited reasons why you would use it over NTFS. FAT32 is the way to go if you ask me.

 

[Sabregod]

I would not use exFAT, there's very limited reasons why you would use it over NTFS. FAT32 is the way to go if you ask me.

Any specific reasons to use FAT32? I don't see why why splitting roms would be an advantage?

 

[Maximilious]

Any specific reasons to use FAT32? I don't see why why splitting roms would be an advantage?

exFAT was made only to support cards of larger capacity (I think higher than 32GB), and you're still limited to a 4GB file size. So unless you have a 64GB SD card there's really no advantage at all. It only allows you to keep one partition instead of 2 or more smaller partitions.

 

[Searinox]

exFAT was made only to support cards of larger capacity (I think higher than 32GB), and you're still limited to a 4GB file size. So unless you have a 64GB SD card there's really no advantage at all. It only allows you to keep one partition instead of 2 or more smaller partitions.

In reality max partition size is max number of clusters(~4.2 billion) times max cluster size(32/64KB(I hear 64 is not universally supported) for FAT32) which gives FAT32 a total max size of around 2 Terabytes FAT32: 2 TiB (16 TiB for 4 KiB sectors) to 8 Terabytes (The maximum possible number of clusters on a volume using the FAT32 file system is 268,435,445. With a maximum of 32 KB per cluster with space for the file allocation table (FAT), this equates to a maximum disk size of approximately 8 terabytes (TB).). The problem here is that (primarily) Windows has poor support for this. Windows XP and higher can only create partitions of 32GB(and the earlier Win98/ME can go as high as 198GB!), but partitions can be extended. Windows users can use a third party tool to format SDXC beyond the 32GB limit in FAT32, making them usable in standard SDHC devices and proving once again that the limit is set by OSs and tools rather than being an innate limit of the partition standard. The maximum possible limit has not yet fully been exploited for SDXC on SD and microSD cards but I do suspect it is indeed 2-8TB just as the standard specifies.

 

[mijuu]

exFAT was made only to support cards of larger capacity (I think higher than 32GB), and you're still limited to a 4GB file size. So unless you have a 64GB SD card there's really no advantage at all. It only allows you to keep one partition instead of 2 or more smaller partitions.

That's incorrect there is no 4gb file size limitation with exfat this is one of the main reasons it was created to deal with the limitations of fat32.

I'm the opposite all previous 9.0 emunands have been slow as fuck at loading taking ages, this one is actually a lot better for me it loads up near instantly no icon lag. The main reason I think emunand now runs like crap for people is all the extra obfuscation gw introduced some versions back as mine has been slow ever since they did this.

 

[swordlord]

As a matter of fact, I'm getting a laffy taffy screen when I boot into emuNAND 9.4. I'm using the default 2gb card on the vanilla 3ds... I was expecting to save my 64gb bigSD.

There's no way to inject save files from 3ds to cia, right?

 

[Normmatt]

That's incorrect there is no 4gb file size limitation with exfat this is one of the main reasons it was created to deal with the limitations of fat32.

I'm the opposite all previous 9.0 emunands have been slow as fuck at loading taking ages, this one is actually a lot better for me it loads up near instantly no icon lag. The main reason I think emunand now runs like crap for people is all the extra obfuscation gw introduced some versions back as mine has been slow ever since they did this.

Nah all the obfuscation is over long before sysmenu even starts loading. It's just 9.x in general that's slow and shitty. Blame Nintendo!

 

[Reecey]

I have a 64GB Elite PNY SD-Card in the side of my XL and it loads instant, it still takes about 4 seconds to load from the GW sign but the home screen loads up asap also with themes loaded into it. Never noticed any slow down at all neither with the aqua one. I think it all depends on how good your SD Card in the side of your 3DS is cause that is where your emunand is loaded from.

 

[TimeMuffin]

I'm not sure why people are having slowdown issues with Original System nand 9.2, makes sense if its only GW as that would be dependant on memory card transfer rates.

Personally have had 0 problems with or without themes, either way it's nice and snappy. I'm using a 32GB Transcend Ultimate by the way. Benchmarks give a read speed of 83Mb/s and a write speed of 37Mb/s on an old macbook pro.