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A beta, preview build for a new Nintendo 3DS emulator called Panda3DS has been released.

The emulator is written in C++ and can be compiled for Windows, Mac and Linux. While the emulator is in its early stages it can already boot several commercial games.

The team behind Panda3DS state their goal is to see if fast 3DS emulation can be achieved on low-end hardware like the Raspberry Pi 4 and to ultimately create an emulator that offers debugging, reverse engineering and modding tools that can assist 3DS homebrew developers and tinkerers.

Screenshots of the Panda3DS emulator running on Windows
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Panda3DS is still in the early stages of development. Many games boot, many don't. Most games have at least some hilariously broken graphics, audio is not supported, performance leaves a bit to be desired mainly thanks to lack of shader acceleration, and most QoL features (including a GUI) are missing.

In addition, some games don't quiiite work with the upstream code. A lot of them might need some panics in the source code to be commented out before they work, etc. However, just the fact things can work as well as they do now is promising in itself.

Why?
The 3DS emulation scene is already pretty mature, with offerings such as Citra which can offer a great playing experience for most games in the library, Corgi3DS, an innovative LLE emulator, or Mikage. However, there's always room for more emulators! While Panda3DS was initially a mere curiosity, there's many different concepts I would like to explore with it in the future, such as:

Virtualization. What motivated the creation of this emulator was actually a discussion on whether it is possible to get fast 3DS emulation on low-end hardware such as the Raspberry Pi 4, using the KVM API. At the moment, Panda3DS is powered by dynarmic rather than using virtualization, but this is definitely a concept I want to explore in the future.

Debugging, reverse engineering and modding tools. While contributing to PCSX-Redux and collaborating with the other developers, I had the chance to find out how useful tools like these can be. They can serve as indispensable tools for the homebrew devs, modders, reverse engineers, as well as emulator developers themselves. Some tools can even become fun toys the casual user can mess around with. As such, I think they can really improve the experience in a project like this. Of course, I'd like to thank @nicolasnoble and the entire Redux team for helping me learn the value of these tools, as well as making me improve as a programmer.

Trying out various other unique features, such as different graphics or audio enhancements, or supporting other niche things such as amiibo.

Fun. Writing code is fun and I strongly encourage anyone to do it.

Keep in mind, these are all long-term plans. Until then, the main focus is just improving compatibility

Panda3DS on GitHub
Panda3DS on Twitter

 

[swabbo]

can't wait for the switch port

 

[Kevbo]

Love to see more commitment on the 3DS / DS scene. Who knows? Maybe we will be able to emulate 3DS games on the 3DS one day

 

[Moon164]

"The team behind Panda3DS state their goal is to see if fast 3DS emulation can be achieved on low-end hardware like the Raspberry Pi 4"

You had my curiosity, but now how you have me attention

 

[skunk_]

Can this run the Yo-Kai Watch trilogy of games?

 

[linuxares]

"The team behind Panda3DS state their goal is to see if fast 3DS emulation can be achieved on low-end hardware like the Raspberry Pi 4"

You had my curiosity, but now how you have me attention

That would be amazing! Tiny Pi being the ultimate TV connected emu machine

 

[MadMakuFuuma]

this is honestly good news. citra is a good emulator (the only one, so far) but the lack of interest at times, from the creators to the user community (in terms of criticism, suggestions etc) makes the project, in my view, stagnated in some points, while other emulators that also only have one viable option to play (pcsx2, dolphin etc) don't have this kind of problem (or, if have, is way less in general). again, critra is a good emulator. to me the problem is the clash i saw, all those years, between users and creators for silly things. i hope that, with a new emulator, things get more interesting from the innovative standpoint. and like some people said, that low end machines benefit from it.

 

[x65943]

Exciting news!

Also just me or the art is reminiscent of

 

[mrcroket]

I never had a good experience with citra, I mean I appreciate the work done by the developers, of course, but I feel that it has been stuck for years.

 

[chrisrlink]

as long as it can run gen6 and 7 (pokemon) at a decent speed i'll be happy and use luma's patching method like what ryujinxs and yuzu does for mods,and remember make sure to not supply keys like what dolphin did that'll just put a huge target on your backs I'm curious on your mac app is it an intel based or native apple sillicon app?

 

[HarveyHouston]

Sounds like a great project to pursue post-mortem (of the 3DS' life cycle). Any interest in utilizing the 3D effect in, I dunno, VR/AR/Mixed Reality?

 

[SylverReZ]

This will be a massive improvement over Citra, I bet.

 

[WaffleRaccoon]

Awesome. The Panda in the logo looks like a Raccoon haha

 

[wheremyfoodat]

can't wait for the switch port

Someone on our Discord server is trying to run it on Ubuntu!Switch. It compiles but gets a SIGILL when trying to run an STLR instruction. Currently investigating.

Post automatically merged: Jul 10, 2023

You guys might also be interested in knowing that we're trying to put the emulator in a Discord bot to play Fire Emblem/Pokemon later on lmao

(Excuse the... odd names present in this screenshot)

Post automatically merged: Jul 10, 2023

as long as it can run gen6 and 7 (pokemon) at a decent speed i'll be happy and use luma's patching method like what ryujinxs and yuzu does for mods,and remember make sure to not supply keys like what dolphin did that'll just put a huge target on your backs I'm curious on your mac app is it an intel based or native apple sillicon app?

Hello. The MacOS builds on Github are all Intel-based because I have no way of easily generating MacOS ARM executables via Github at the moment. However the emulator does build and run fine natively on M1 Macs (part of it was developed on M1). Keep in mind though it might be faster to use the x64 builds + shader recompiler until we manage to port shader recompilation to arm64

 

[Cris1997XX]

Vita port when?? I think it could be a mix of emulation and native code, since they're both ARM-based consoles

 

[James_]

You guys might also be interested in knowing that we're trying to put the emulator in a Discord bot to play Fire Emblem/Pokemon later on lmao

Ocarina of Time 3D on Discord?

We've gone too far

 

[Flame]

Hold strong people, here comes the pokefans. They going to ask if it can run they lame games.


But seriously when will it be able to run pokemon games?

 

[PoloNX]

Impressive !

 

[Korma]

I see on the github you mention improving perf on low end devices using the KVM api, does that mean itll function similar to how QEMU is used to emulate machines?

 

[wheremyfoodat]

Hold strong people, here comes the pokefans. They going to ask if it can run they lame games.


But seriously when will it be able to run pokemon games?

Mainline Pokemon is pretty brutal for HLE 3DS emulation. Currently the emulator is incapable of booting them due to no CRO support. After that they'll also need AAC (Audio thingie) support, though I think they might be able to boot without it.

I can't give an estimate but I hope relatively soonish

Post automatically merged: Jul 10, 2023

I see on the github you mention improving perf on low end devices using the KVM api, does that mean itll function similar to how QEMU is used to emulate machines?

That's how I picture it. The emulator is currently not doing virtualization yet though, it's doing good old recompilation from ARMv6K (3DS) to x86-64 or arm64 depending on the platform you're running on (and we will keep supporting this forever; it's necessary to have JITs for various platforms to be as portable as possible. Virtualization would only be supported on select platforms, as opposed to our current JIT model which runs on pretty much every computer currently in use and offers pretty good performance already)

Also nice pfp

 

[Korma]

That's how I picture it. The emulator is currently not doing virtualization yet though, it's doing good old recompilation from ARMv6K (3DS) to x86-64 or arm64 depending on the platform you're running on (and we will keep supporting this forever; it's necessary to have JITs for various platforms to be as portable as possible. Virtualization would only be supported on select platforms, as opposed to our current JIT model which runs on pretty much every computer currently in use and offers pretty good performance already)

Also nice pfp

Very cool, after seeing projects like Spine emu and using QEMU myself, Im definitely interested in seeing different methods of console emulation. Looking forward to seeing your project grow