Homebrew Question about porting

[Bl4aze]

So I want to begin porting a few games to the 3DS im not very expirenced in coding but the games i would want to port have source code.

My question is how difficult is it to port a game made in C# to the 3DS if i also have the complete source code?

And this game not a very powerful game and can run on pretty much and computer new and old its basically runnable on old DOS computers. And in fact someone ported the game to SMILEbasic but the port was done very poorly.

Thanks

 

[Kwyjor]

/r/3dshacks has this useful explanation:
https://www.reddit.com/r/3dshacks/comments/6ob40t/in_response_to_the_can_x_be_ported_threads/

im not very expirenced in coding

Lots of people are not very experienced. If it was easy for people without coding experience to do something like this, then everyone would be doing it already.

its basically runnable on old DOS computers.

I don't know why you would say that about something written in C#.

 

[FAST6191]

Complete source code does help a lot. Normally we get this question for people wanting to port the latest and greatest or some really involved PC game.

C# is a high level language with a lot of libraries (so many that if you did not have source code you can often still generate some code to play with if it was originally written in C#), most of which have not been replicated on the 3DS (or at least not in anything like the form used in C#) or indeed much other than Windows (technically linux has something in the https://www.mono-project.com/ ). That would leave you either converting the source code to something like what the 3ds uses, or writing a library that behaves like the C# libraries/functions the original game uses, or maybe meeting somewhere in the middle.

Without knowing what the game is I can not say too much more, however if it is fairly basic and SMILEbasic can also handle it then it is likely a reasonable candidate for a port. If it is going to be the thing that gets you to learn to code (such things go so much better when you have a project/goal to accomplish) and it does indeed run on super low end machines then that speaks to something reasonable.