Toggle sidebar

Homebrew Question Playing games from HDD or other External USB

[Nintendo Switch] Raika Azahar - The 3DS Emulator aimed at base Nintendo Switch

Raibatsu · 2026-08-07T06:39:15+00:00

------ 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. ============================== What makes Raika Azahar unique: ============================== Async Shader Compilation - First one to implement it in fact! Very proud of it. We are making massive strides toward eliminating shader stutter. Moving from Raikopon v1.0 to Raika Azahar v2.0 has already achieved over a 90% reduction in shader compilation time, while significantly cutting down the overall number of shaders that need to compile. Direct On-Device Cheat Editor - No need to hop onto a PC—you can now write, edit, and manage your cheats directly on the console UI. Direct On-Device Mods Manager - After copying your mods to adequate location, you can easily manage your mods on your Switch. Fully Customizable Dual-Screen Layouts - Complete freedom over your display. Adjust screen sizes, drag them around, tweak opacity, change rotation, or hide/show screens using touch or controller inputs. Built-In App Updater - Stay up to date without ever leaving your Switch. Download and install the latest builds seamlessly in-app. Experimental Features & Performance Hacks - I love pushing the limits and trying new ideas! Raika introduces experimental features like Ubershaders, an enhanced FMV hack for smooth video playback, and granular per-game settings. Cross-Fork Integration & Community Driven - I’m continuously porting and adapting the best features from across the scene (Citra-MMJ, Azahar, Tico, and more) to bring them together into one place. If there's a feature from another fork you'd love to see brought over, drop a comment below! ========= Features: ========= 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. ============================== Latest Version: 2.5.0 | 18/08/2026 ============================== Downloads: GitHub | Releases Source code: GitHub | Source Code <- This source code reflects Raikopon 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. =========================== Recommended configuration: =========================== - 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!

Thread starter BLCKBLuR
Start date Jun 12, 2019
Views 2,871
Replies 6

BLCKBLuR

Well-Known Member

Member

Level 5

Jun 12, 2019

Hey everyone! Just got my switch modded finally, after I had some great help from a few people on this forum ;]

Just wondering, I know you can play games on the switch from a USB HDD or flash drive with SX OS...

But is there any way to do that without SX OS?

I am running Atmosphere.

Last edited by BLCKBLuR, Jun 12, 2019