Nintendo 3DS emulation on Android just got a lot less confusing

Azahar provided a light at the end of the tunnel after the Nintendo 3DS emulator Citra was caught in the crossfire of Nintendo’s legal actions against Yuzu, but there was always one major complaint. A complaint that earned it countless poor reviews on Google Play, causing great confusion among users and spawning several sketchy forks.

That change is the removal of support for .3ds files, which is by far the most common ROM file type for Nintendo 3DS games. The team claimed this was to distance the project from its predecessor’s dubious roots in piracy, but in practice, all you needed to do was change the file extension from .3ds to .cci, and it still worked, provided the files were not encrypted.

This caused significant user frustration, as evidenced by early reviews on the Google Play Store listing. Now, the devs are reversing that decision and restoring support for the .3ds filetype. In an update released today, the team admits that the removal was “an act of project philosophy rather than a technical change,” although the emulator still does not and likely never will support encrypted ROMs.

One unforeseen consequence of the removal was the creation of forks that restored support. Azahar is open-source and forks are perfectly fine and legal, but one particular fork caused significant confusion by using the same name, ignoring requests to change it.

As the Azahar team writes in the latest release, “These forks used unsafe deployment practices, presented licensing concerns, and confused users as to whether the forks were part of the upstream Azahar project. These circumstances created an unhealthy open-source development environment, and we don’t believe that this is in the best interest of the 3DS emulation scene.”

This is the only change found in release 2124.3, which has already been pushed to the Google Play Store. You can also sideload the new version from the official GitHub page.