What are the limitations of porting games to the 3DS? How can we tell if the 3DS would be powerful enough for those games, if we could port them?
I have a few Zelda fan games in mind, 2D ALttP-style, that were made in C++, with full source code available, and am wondering if porting these to the 3DS would be a possibility.
If the Homebrew Launcher cannot handle these as .3dsx homebrew, then maybe it'd be possible to get them running properly as .cia homebrew installed to emunand? Or if they can't run well on O3DS, then at least maybe the N3DS could handle it.
If anyone is interested, this is one of them (likely to be the most resource-intensive one.)
http://www.zelda-solarus.com/zs/article/zmosdx-telechargements/
Website all in French, but the game has options for several languages including English. Source code for the game engine and for the game data are at the bottom of the page.
If we can have the game engine running on 3DS, it might even be possible for people to make their own games to run on the engine. As of right now I know of 4 games that run on that engine (two are in-progress AFAIK), so it might be fun if we were able to get it working. There is a quest editor which could possibly be used as some kind of Zelda Maker maybe? For people to make their own games to run on the engine. Game files would still have to be compiled specifically for the 3DS but the main engine would already be done.
I'm not nearly knowledgeable enough in C++ let alone 3DS programming to achieve this, but if this is something that could be done and someone is interested, I think it would be amazing.
There is also
Return of the Hylian,
Oni-Link Begins,
Time to Triumph and
Navi's Quest, all made in C++ with SDL by the same person. Those have all been ported to the PSP already as well, so I wonder if 3DS ports would be possible.
The English translations are... not very good, but that should be easily fixable.