Emulation News: A look at Citra’s 2020 Android Port Progress Report – Release slated for early 2020 & promises full-speed emulation in popular titles on mid-high range devices!
Emulating console games on one’s smartphone is pretty commonplace nowadays as it provides IAP-free gaming and a large selection of good titles to choose from. In line with New Year’s celebrations, we have some good news for emulation on smartphones as Citra is now closer than ever to releasing their 3DS emulator on Android and is promising some pretty exciting stuff!
Citra on Android’s current state & the unofficial ports
Before going into what the Citra Team is promising, it’s important to state what they’ve already achieved which is a pretty good deal even though they haven’t been as vocal as other emulators about it. Among the things that have been achieved during the closed-doors development process include:
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An ARM64 JIT Compiler by Sachin-v which goes a long way in improving game performance
Compared to modern smartphones, the 2/3DS isn’t nowhere as powerful but it’s still not easy to emulate. However, the Citra folks have done a great deal of progress and they’re even dabbling in New 3DS emulation among other features!
- A memory technique called fastmem which allows the aforementioned JIT to directly access memory which gives pretty good FPS boosts
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Multi-core support since modern ARM SoCs come with a high number of lower-powered cores rather than fewer more-powerful cores like desktop CPU
- It’s important to state that this is still work-in-progress so it hasn’t been perfected yet
- Support for playing with a game controller which is undoubtedly a huge feature since not everybody loves touch controls!
- Some other things, which are currently present in Citra’s nightly builds for PC, have also been added which include support for caching shaders to disk, a proper VSync implementation & an OpenGL ES 3 backend which fixes most graphical issues with games.
While the above sounds like more than enough for an official release, Citra’s Team noted that the Android port is not yet finished and as a result, it needs more work before a good quality release can be rolled out. As a result of this, some individuals have released unofficial Citra ports, such as the MMJ builds, which make use of some code developed behind closed doors, and often breaking the GPL license, while implementing their own hacks in order to provide better performance. Due to this and other factors, Citra’s Team refrained from publicly sharing the source code of their WIP Android port but promise to release all the code when they officially release the Android application thus allowing other developers to contribute.
What’s left to be done & the team’s promise about performance
As the previous section has explained, the Citra Team have achieved a great deal on Android and they describe the port as being in ‘pretty good shape already’ meaning that their intention of a full release in early 2020 has a very high chance of being coming true!
In some recent unofficial builds, titles like Mario Kart 7 are already running @ 60FPS on high-end SoCs like the SnapDragon 855 so Citra’s promise seems pretty realistic! [Image from a video by MasterKillua]
- Improving the Android application in order to provide a better user experience
- Further testing of the improvements that have been implemented
- Implementing more performance improvements in order to eliminate slowdowns on lower-end hardware
Towards its end, the progress report culminates in a promise stating that the official release should provide full speed emulation in the most popular titles on medium to high-end Android devices with a somewhat playable experience being provided on lower-end ones. Without a doubt, this is a pretty big promise and if it’s indeed true, Citra could cement its place as the de facto 3DS emulator on Android similar to DraStic’s position which is slated to become open-source later this year.
Conclusion
It’s important to keep in mind that Android phones come in a wide variety of hardware configurations so not all may provide good performance when the Citra port is officially released. However, the Citra Team seem to be putting a good deal of effort into the port so hopefully, we’ll be seeing a good deal of support even after the initial release!
On the iOS front, DolphiniOS 2.0 has been released for Patreon supports which brings game controller support among other things.
Citra’s Android Progress Report for 2020 (it’s a public Patreon post; provides more in-depth information): https://www.patreon.com/posts/32758548
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Still wondering on this – UTF 1 and 2: While UTF both worked great (little Issues In-Menu). But now, UTF 1 still working, where UTF2 does not.
Both Games have a bit when starting up, where they go to try to Communicate with N. Both have the same method of Skipping it. But for 2, it gets to the Connecting Screen, and then the FPS just plummets to 0, but the Music is still going. Used to be like UTF1 where it could get past that screen and get into the Game. Now, it just is stuck there.
Any news about the Nintendo ds for ps vita?
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I wonder if my old (but still strong) SD820 will play those games good enough.
Just grab Citra MMJ (an unofficial release of the Citra android port) from its github.
It runs Pokemon games and OOT 3D full speed on my Pixel 2 XL (Snapdragon 835).
Other games require more powerful phones. Star Fox 64 3D requires an 855 or equivilent most likely, NSMBU Gold edition requires an 845 or equivilent.