This ist release 2.0 of TinyVNC, a VNC viewer for Nintendo 3DS. TinyVNC is made up of multiple components:
- two VNC clients, one for top, one for bottom screen
- a streaming audio client (mp3 over HTTP) to transfer sounds from the VNC server
- A Cemuhook server and vJoy UDP feeder client to send controller information to the VNC server
Taking all components together, you can connect to any computer running a VNC server, see the screen contents, hear the system sounds and control it with your 3DS.
VNC clients
From Wikipedia: "VNC (Virtual Network Computing) is a graphical desktop-sharing system [...] to remotely control another computer. It transmits the keyboard and mouse events from one computer to another, relaying the graphical-screen updates back in the other direction, over a network". Contrary to RDP (which is Microsoft only), it is platform-independent and thus works with Windows, Linux, MacOS, Android and many more ...!
I tested TinyVNC with Windows and with multiple VNC servers. TightVNC (https://www.tightvnc.com/) server seems to work best. Even streaming videos or games works well (as can be seen in my controversial video playing "Breath of the Wild" on my 3DS).
As a rule of thumb: the larger the server display resolution, the worse the performance. This is because the server display is transferred to the 3DS in full and TinyVNC scales the image to fit the 400x240px 3DS screen. Server side scaling is supported if the server supports it (AFAIK only UltraVNC). TightVNC server gives the possibility to share only parts of the screen, which is a nice feature if you want to play games with TinyVNC.
From my experience, a server resolution of 800x480 is great for web browsing etc, but for video- or game streaming, the server should have a display resolution of 400x240px or even less.
During first start, TinyVNC will write its config files to the SD card. You can customize the file /3ds/TinyVNC/keymap to customize button mappings for the VNC-connection. Preconfigured button mappings are:
- A: a-key
- B: b-key
- X: x-key
- Y: y-key
- L: Left mouse button
- R: w-key
- ZL, ZR: 1, 2-keys
- C-Pad: Cursor up, down, left, right
- D-Pad: t, g, f, h-keys
- C-Stick: i, k, j, l-keys
- SELECT: Shift-key
- START: Open quick command menu
- SELECT + START: Disconnect
Audio streaming
Audio streaming is supported (mp3 over HTTP) but requires an additional server software running on the VNC server machine. This can be easily setup using VLC media player (https://www.videolan.org/vlc/). Below is a short tutorial how to do that.
I. Set up an audio device that captures all your system sounds
Voilà, you're done and should hear your systems audio when conneting to the VNC server
- Go to Start Menu and search for "Control Panel", open the Control Panel
- Go to menu "Hardware and Sound" -> "Manage audio devices" and choose tab "Recording"
- Right-click in the list of recording devices and check "Show disabled devices"
- Check if you have a "Stereo Mix" device. If yes, right-click the device and click on "Enable". This recording device will now record all your sounds that your system plays and provide it to whatever program is interested.
- If you don't have a "Stereo Mix" device, you can install something similar using VB-Cable https://vb-audio.com/Cable/. After installing this software, you need to choose the playback device "CABLE Input" as your default.
- Start VLC and choose "Media"->"Stream"
- Choose Tab "Capture Device", set "Capture Mode" to "DirectShow", set "Video Device Name" to "None" and set "Audio Device Name" to the audio capture device from Section I. Click on button "Stream"
- In the "Source"-Screen, click Next
- In "Destination Setup", select "HTTP" as New Destination and click "Add". In the next screen, port 8080 and path "/" are normally fine - this is what you need to specify in TinyVNC settings as well. Now click "Next"
- In "Transcoding Options", check "Activate Transcoding", choose Profile "Audio - MP3" and click on the little wrench to the right of the dropdown box
- In Tab "Encapsulation", choose "MP3". In Tab"Audio Codec", choose Codec "MP3" and a desired bitrate (96 should be ok, choose 64 or lower if you have isses with the bandwidth). Click on "Save", then "Next", then "Stream"
- Now VLC will stream all audio coming from the above audio capture device (which is ideally set up to capture all your system sounds) via HTTP-server on port 8080, path "/" as MP3 to clients who are interested in hearing. You can test this by directing your browser to http://<servername>:8080/, where <servername> should be the IP address of the computer you're running VLC on.
Voilà, you're done and should hear your systems audio when conneting to the VNC server
Cemuhook-server
Controller information is already transferred to the server as keyboard or mouse events using the VNC connection (this can be disabled or enabled in the connection options tough). However, the VNC-connection has limitations: The analogue 3DS-joysticks are only transferred as digital values up, down, left and right. Additionally, no gyro and accelerometer info is sent via the VNC connection. This is why a Cemuhook-server is now included into TinyVNC, which can be enabled in the connection properties. To actually use this Cemuhook server for example in Cemu, you will have to add serverIP = 3DS.IP.ADDRESS.HERE (and serverPort = XXXXX if you've changed it from the default 26760 value) under the [Input] section of cemuhook.ini (inside your CEMU installation directory).
The mappings are as follows:
3DS Controller
C-Pad Left Stick
C-Stick Right Stick
SELECT + D-Pad Up Plus (+)
SELECT + D-Pad Down Minus (-)
SELECT + D-Pad Left Left Stick Push
SELECT + D-Pad Right Right Stick Push
all other buttons have the default mapping (A -> A etc.)
If you have an old 3DS (without ZL, ZR and C-Stick), you can use L, R and C-Pad while holding SELECT to map to ZL, ZR and Right Stick.
SELECT + START stops the software.
vJoy-UDP-feeder-client
The vJoy-UDP-feeder-client is an additional way to transfer controller information to the VNC server. It needs one or two vJoy-UDP-feeder (https://github.com/klach/vjoy-udp-feeder) running on the VNC server machine. All buttons and joysticks are transferred to one UDP feeder, motion data (gyro, accelerometer) is transferred to another UDP feeder.
The 3DS SELECT-button acts as a Shift-Key, so pressing SELECT + A on your 3DS sends a different button to vJoy than just pressing A.
Download here: https://github.com/badda71/TinyVNC/releases
Installation:
Install CIA with FBI or run 3dsx from homebrew launcher (put 3dsx file in /3ds/TinyVNC dir).
Current version is 2.0
v2.0
- support of 2nd VNC connection on bottom screen
- added vJoy-UDP-feeder clients: one for buttons and joysticks, another for motion controls
- added Cemuhook server: sends motion controls, buttons and joysticks to clients (Cemu, Yuzu etc.)
- added server (if supported) or client side scaling. Now, screens >1024px size are scaled automatically.
- TinyVNC can now be run without VNC-connection (e.g. only cemuhook server or only mp3 stream client)
- added quick command menu to control connection settings
- added "shift"-key to enable button combinations
- lots of minor optimizations and bugfixes
- CIA/3DS version
- added streaming audio support (mp3 via HTTP)
- added on-screen keyboard
- configurable scaling (on/off)
- key value to toggle bottom backlight (8)
- Initial version
Have fun!
Last edited by Badda,