Homebrew Optimizing Emulation on New3DS

[Andorin]

Good evening,

First of all sorry if the creation of this thread is unappropriate, i'm very new to the N3DS scene and the reading of the thousand pages on this forum did not help me on certain points, but maybe this new thread could be helping me and other people:

I travel a lot, and when I can't bring my guitar or books I love playing retro video games. With my previous PSP it was great, I could play a lot of retro plateforms such as SNES, PS1 GBA etc... And now that I have my brand new New3DS on Custom Firmware, I managed to install some CIA .gba games, SNES and Retro Arch for my PSX Games.
I love optimizing, trying to get the best FPS, best ways to play and everything and here are my requests;

I/ Differences between EMULATORS and CIA files:

First of all, I wanna be sure to understand. Contrarly to PSP, on 3DS I can both install emulators to play games in their initial extansion OR I can convert these initial retro games into CIA files to directly launch them.

First question: According to your personnal experience, what is the best (and by using "best" I'm trying to say best framerates, no bugs, best battery life optimizing...) way to play retro games such as GBA, GBC or SNES ? Playing files converted into CIA or playing Emulators ?
According to my very new experience, playing gba games converted into CIA is great so far, but maybe i'm missing some others opportunities to make it even better.

II/ The RetroArch opportunity:

Again, if I understand: RetroArch is an app that contains several emulators. I installed only ReArmed PS1 emulator from last stable version to play Warcraft 2, Theme Hospital and FF7. They work "great" (as much as a 3DS could emulate PS1 (when I learnt that I was so AMAZED, PS1 with Gba is my fav' plateform))

Second question:
BUT, again, I learnt that we could play PS1 games by converting PBP files into CIA and was wondering, again, what was the best according to your community ? Cia files or Retroarch emulator ? It might depend of the games and personnal settings we can set, you may say, but your opinion counts, to me.


Bonus; Now knowing that I like retro-gaming (especially gba and psx) on portable plateforms for travelling, I am very curious and ear opened to every kind of Homebrews or application (or things to do) for/with a new hacked New3DS.
Or we can just share opinions/discuss about games or anything btw,

Hope it fits good here.
Cya guys

 

[placebo_yue]

i believe the CIA files are just some kind of prepacked game+emulator on your home screen. If you check on the software used to make those CIAs from the roms, you'll see they let you decide which emulator to use, each one having different options and compatibilities.
But hey maybe im wrong.
I'm not too fond of retroarch i think it's a bit bloated, with it's 50 cores, and endless menus. But im not talking performance here, just SD card space.

 

[KleinesSinchen]

Installing CIAs is more or less

Virtual Console injection: (injecting in homebrew emulators is also possible)
Using official GB(C), Game Gear, (S)NES emulators. For supported games they are pretty good. Sometimes they don't play romhacks and the SNES emulator does not support Super-FX and SA1 games (if I remember that correctly).
For GBA this is completely different. The 3DS has an additional firmware ("operating system"). That is AGBFIRM. This way the 3DS essentially becomes a GBA, runs games natively with almost perfect compatibility -- no games with sensors built in (light, tilt). Since this is not emulation this is the most true to the original experience -- but of course missing things like save states.
=======

With the overall 300 title limit of the Home Menu I prefer loading ROMs from an emulator over injecting them each one into a title. GBA is another topic Running the games natively is perfect and eliminates the temptation of quickly using savestates on hard games.

Never used Retroarch - Only standalone (S)NES emulators. They perform pretty well:
https://github.com/bubble2k16/snes9x_3ds/releases
https://github.com/bubble2k16/emus3ds

 

[Andorin]

Hey Bud' !

I'm using ULTIMATE GBA VC Injector to convert my gba roms, and I did not know that kind of programs already used an emulator.
My personal thinkin is that it uses the core of the 3DS itselfs, seeing that gba games are playable fullspeed thanks to the E shop.

Am I wrong ?

Thanks

 

[Andorin]

Installing CIAs is more or less

Virtual Console injection: (injecting in homebrew emulators is also possible)
Using official GB(C), Game Gear, (S)NES emulators. For supported games they are pretty good. Sometimes they don't play romhacks and the SNES emulator does not support Super-FX and SA1 games (if I remember that correctly).
For GBA this is completely different. The 3DS has an additional firmware ("operating system"). That is AGBFIRM. This way the 3DS essentially becomes a GBA, runs games natively with almost perfect compatibility -- no games with sensors built in (light, tilt). Since this is not emulation this is the most true to the original experience -- but of course missing things like save states.
=======

With the overall 300 title limit of the Home Menu I prefer loading ROMs from an emulator over injecting them each one into a title. GBA is another topic Running the games natively is perfect and eliminates the temptation of quickly using savestates on hard games.

Never used Retroarch - Only standalone (S)NES emulators. They perform pretty well:
https://github.com/bubble2k16/snes9x_3ds/releases
https://github.com/bubble2k16/emus3ds

Hey !

Sorry, was replying to the previous post and did not see yours.
Thank you so much for the information, I understand better now.