Citra: An open source Nintendo 3DS emulator

Si you are a fan of video games, let me tell you that, surfing the net, I have come across an emulator by Nintendo 3DS quite interesting, one that has new updates daily and has a great support team (more than 50 people), I'll tell you a little about Citra.

Citra is an open source emulator for Nintendo 3DS written in C ++, licensed under the GPLv2. This emulator has been developed keeping in mind that it has portability since it has actively maintained compilations for Windows, Linux and macOS.

Currently the emulator has successfully executed different commercial titles, having a wide gameplay catalog, among the games that I can highlight are Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS, Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Gates to Infinity, Pokémon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire, among others, if you want to know which game titles are executed by Citra without complications, you can see from this link.

How to install Citra on Ubuntu 17.04?

The emulator has two development versions which are Nightly Builds and Bleeding Edge, in this case I recommend the Nightly, any of these you can download from this link.

Now, once the emulator is downloaded, some dependencies will need to be installed so as not to have problems with the execution of this.

First we will install the SDL2 dependency. For this we have to open a terminal and write the following commands:

sudo apt-get install sdl2

If it doesn't work with this other command:

sudo apt-get install libsdl2-2.0-0

Or finally try this other one:

sudo apt-get install libsdl2-dev

The next dependency to install is GCC v5, we install it with:

sudo apt-get install build-essential

And the rest are cmake, clang and curl, we install these with the commands:

sudo apt-get install cmake && apt-get install clang libc++-dev && apt-get install libcurl4-openssl-dev

Now we proceed to install the emulator, for this it will be necessary to unzip the file, after doing this we will open a terminal and position ourselves inside the folder that we unzipped and installed with the following commands:

mkdir build && cd build
cmake ../ -DUSE_SYSTEM_CURL=1
make
sudo make install

Run Citra without installing it on the system.

The emulator has the option of being able to run it without the need to install it on the system, for this it is recommended that we clone the GIT of it, we do it with:

git clone --recursive https://github.com/citra-emu/citra
cd citra

And finally we have two options to run it SDL or QT.

cd build/src/citra/
./citra

cd build/src/citra_qt/
./citra-qt

How to install Citra on Ubuntu 14.04?

If you are a user of the LTS version of Ubuntu 14.04 and you want to run the emulator on your system, the commands of the aforementioned dependencies will not be useful, so to make the emulator work well on your system it is necessary to install these dependencies within your system.

First we will have to add this repository and install with:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-toolchain-r/test
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install gcc-5 g++-5

Then we proceed to install the other dependencies with:

sudo apt-get install lib32stdc++6

xorg-dev

sudo apt-get install xorg-dev

Qt5

sudo apt-get install qt5-default libqt5opengl5-dev

cmake

wget https://cmake.org/files/v3.8/cmake-3.8.1-Linux-x86_64.sh
sh cmake-3.8.1-Linux-x86_64.sh --prefix=~/cmake
wget http://libsdl.org/release/SDL2-2.0.4.tar.gz -O - | tar xz
cd SDL2-2.0.4
./configure
make
sudo make install

And ready with it, we proceed to install the emulator with its respective commands that we mentioned steps back.

To start using the emulator you have two optionsOne of these is if you have game data or saved games, you can pass your data to the emulator, you need to consult the emulator wiki. And the other is to acquire your games and pass them to the emulator.

Many will wonder and where do I get the games, this is where I personally give the emulator a point in favor, since it creates the culture of not promoting piracy.

For legal and same reasons that the creators of the emulator clarify, an essential requirement that the games you want to run on it be purchased, since the emulator does not account or support pirated games that you can find on the network, for more details about it , you can check in this link.