Unlike other emulation teams, the Citra team aren’t too big on PR and they don’t publish many status updates. However, when they do, they publish very well written articles describing a lot of awesome stuff and in this article, we’ll be looking at their latest status update which covers a period from Q4 2018 to Q1 2019!

What the Citra folks have been up to in the past 6 months

While not very vocal about their efforts, the people behind Citra have achieved a lot in the past half a year which greatly improves the quality and accuracy of the emulator.

Among the things that have been achieved we find:

• More accurate audio emulation
• Pokémon X and Y are playable at full speed with only minor issues
• Cheat support
• Microphone input support
• Support for Amiibos
• Ability to swap controllers on the fly (hot-plugging)
• A significant amount of work being done on achieving support for splittable screens and New Nintendo 3DS titles
• Improvements to multiplayer
• Other stuff like support for physical touchscreens, more accurate audio emulation, work being done on an Android port and much much more!

Support for cheats, microphone input, amiibos and controller hot-plugging

These 4 features are somewhat major and a pretty good amount of Patreon supporters voted for them to be implemented in a poll that took place last August.

Cheat code support, which is based on makotech222’s old cheat code support, was implemented by B3N30 after wwylele rewrote almost every aspect of memory management in Citra. To use cheats, there is a newly implemented cheat window by zhaowenlan1779 which makes it much easy to stop being pwned in your favourite Zelda/Pokemon game!

Microphone input is a pretty self explanatory feature but gave jroweboy quite a few headaches to implement as he accidentally mixed up some bytes when it came to defining the size for microphone input data. Thankfully, these bugs were pointed out by FearlessTobi last week and now, microphone input is fully supported in Citra so you can play games like Cooking Mama properly.

If you like changing controllers on the fly, then B3N30’s controller hot-plugging support will surely interest you.

This was achieved by rewriting the controller backend which was a pretty big task but it also improved Citra’a reliability. Another smaller feature that was introduced was amiibo support, with some code from yuzu (Switch emulator), so you can use AR stuff on Citra although I’m not sure why anyone would want to use it in the first place on an emulator.

As all these features are working, they can be found in the latest Citra Nightly/Canary builds which you can grab right now by following the link below

Stuff that’s been worked on but is current on hold: New Nintendo 3DS support, Splittable screen functionality. A look at work being done on an Android port

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This section will now focus on features that aren’t fully implemented yet but in which a decent amount of work has been poured.

One of these features is support for New Nintendo 3DS games which is proving to be somewhat challenging as reversing the 3DS’ scheduler (utility determing which processes are to be admitted in the process queue and which ones should get CPU time) is no easy task. As of right now, B3N30, the person working on this feature, has taken a break from it but he’ll undoubtedly pick it up and perhaps finish it as he’s already delivered on a lot of features as mentioned above.

Splittable screen support is another feature that quite a few people want and jroweboy was working on it although a fully elegant solution to implementing it is still not present. As a result, the Citra team is asking the general public to lend it a hand in finding a good way to implement this feature.

Last but not least, the Citra team are apparently working on an official Android version of the emulator but it must be noted that work is progressing somewhat slowly and emulator front-end application isn’t good enough for the public to use. The currently available unofficial Android Citra builds make heavy use of Dolphin’s Android UI but a totally new UI will be developed for official builds.

Conclusion

In this article, only the most significant parts of Citra’s progress report were touched upon as there simply is too much to cover. For more information, you may check out their progress report by following the link and/or give them a few bucks through their Patreon account to support further development!

Citra Q4 2018 to Q1 2019 progress report: https://citra-emu.org/entry/citra-progress-report-2019-q1/

Citra Download Link: https://citra-emu.org/download/

Citra Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/citraemu