How to Play 3DS Games on the Citra Emulator After Its Shutdown

The Nintendo 3DS was released in March 2011 as the successor to the wildly popular Nintendo DS. It continued Nintendo‘s trend of flagship handheld consoles, and offered improved graphical capabilities, as well as other versatile tools like a camera. While it was not an overwhelming success in terms of sales like its predecessor, it was a worthy successor nonetheless.

The 3DS is most well-known for being the Nintendo console where the first fully 3D Pokémon games were launched, while also offering 3D remakes of old classics e.g. Pokémon Omega Ruby/Alpha Sapphire, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D, etc. These were a delight for newcomers and veterans alike. So if you’re looking to emulate the 3DS, you must have come across the name Citra.

What is the Citra Emulator?

Citra was an open–source emulator developed to run 3DS games. First released in 2014, Citra took a long time to get off the ground and achieve a truly stable state, as 3DS games were miles ahead in terms of graphics when compared to the DS. Nevertheless, Citra was able to work its way up and soon was able to run on relatively older hardware. An Android version was also released on the Google Play Store.

Citra was a huge success, mostly because it had no major rival to speak of, but also because of the quality of the emulator. Its excellent optimization, speed hacks, cheats, and especially multiplayer support made it a favorite within the emulation community. Its success and the demand from the fans is what prompted the developers to begin developing an emulator for the Nintendo Switch named Yuzu.

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↪ Citra’s discontinuation

Now, you might be thinking why we’ve been referring to Citra in the past tense. Well, that’s because, unfortunately, development on Citra has been stopped and its repository on GitHub has also been removed. Why? The answer for this is also applicable in case someone asks why everyone hates Nintendo.

For the most part, the developers of Citra, Tropic Haze LLC, had moved on to Yuzu. While some developers continued working on Citra, most of the team was focused on Yuzu. However in March 2024, Nintendo filed a lawsuit against Tropic Haze LLC accusing them of “endorsing piracy and making profits off of their expense”.

Since Tropic Haze LLC was a team of developers who worked on Yuzu and Citra as a hobby and only took donations, they agreed to a settlement with Nintendo where they would stop development on all projects related to Nintendo, in exchange for not being fined. And thus, this marked the end of Yuzu and Citra both.

The State of 3DS Emulation

Although Citra shut down around 5 months ago, there aren’t as many successors to it like its sister project Yuzu. One major cause for this is that most 3DS games were functional and, for the most part, playable from the start till the end without any major issues. The few that weren’t, were not popular titles, or were ported titles that you were better off playing using another emulator for another console.

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How To Play Games on the Citra Emulator

While development on Citra was abandoned by the original developers, with the GitHub page also being removed, that doesn’t mean you still can’t get it. Its well-known that once something is uploaded to the Internet, it can never be completely removed and Citra is no exception. Also make sure to copy all your 3DS games to a single folder. Without further ado, let’s get to it.

↪ Running Citra on desktop

1. In order to download Citra, you need to make your way to the Internet Archive. Scroll down and select your preferred compression from the right. If you’re using Anything other than Windows, refer to the information on the Internet Archive page of Citra.
   

   

2. Now, choose the file titled “citra-windows-msvc-20240303-0ff3440” and click on it to download it. Linux users should download the file titled “citra-nightly-nightly-2104” and follow the building instructions.
   

   

3. Once the file is downloaded, extract it using 7–Zip or WinRAR anywhere you want.
   

   

4. Next, open up the folder you just extracted and double–click on “citra–qt.exe“.
   

   

5. Congratulations! You’ve now got Citra installed on your PC. All that’s left now is to run some games. Double–click on the empty space of Citra.
   

   

6. A pop-up window should appear. Browse and select the folder where your 3DS games are stored.
   

   

7. Once done, the Citra home screen should now show a library of games.
   

   

8. Finally, double–click on any game to start running it.
   

   

9. Enjoy!
   

   

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↪ Getting the Citra emulator on Android

The process to download the Citra emulator on Android is very similar to the desktop process. When Citra was discontinued, it was removed from the Google Play Store. But like the desktop version, Citra Android lives on the Internet Archive. Simply search for it there, download the APK file, install the app, copy your games on to your phone, watch a YouTube tutorial for the best settings and you’re good to go!

Citra vs. Competitors

Although Citra shut down around 5 months ago, there aren’t as many successors to it like its sister project Yuzu. While Yuzu has seen a number of successors due to new games being added to the Switch’s library, Citra has only 1 successors; Lime3DS. Lime3DS is essentially using the same code as Citra, since it was an open-source project.

However, it still suffer from inconsistent performances here and there. Hence, most players still prefer to use Citra. That is not to say, that Lime3DS is all bad, as the developers are working hard to make the project better.

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Conclusion

While Citra and Yuzu may have shut down due to legal action taken by Nintendo, it doesn’t mean that emulators are illegal. Emulators are completely legal, and this shutdown seems to have place the emulation community on high-alert into archiving and open-sourcing their projects. By doing so, their projects continue to live on, if the worst comes to pass.

At any rate, its time to wipe the dust off all those 3DS CDs and play through some of the finest of Nintendo’s games with Citra!