Emulation might be seen as a dirty word to the likes of Nintendo, but to others, it provides a vital way of keeping historic games alive. The world of game emulation is full of passionate gamers and legal woes, with the latest project falling into the former category. This weekend sees the launch of CitraVR, an emulator for Meta Quest that’ll let you play your Nintendo 3DS games.
CitraVR is the work of Amanda Watson, who previously worked at Oculus and created Air Link. Having previously teased work on ‘something big’, as it turns out, it was a VR version of the Citra emulator for Windows, Linux and MacOS. The emulator was designed: “for playing 3DS homebrew and personal game backups in 3D on the go with your Quest,” says Watson.
CitraVR on Meta Quest
You can use Citra to stream 3DS games from your PC to your Quest. However, CitraVR improves upon this by running natively on Meta Quest as an OpenXR app. It’ll have a few features at launch including support for stereoscopic rendering to give that 3DS feel of depth. Passthrough support so you can play classics such as Mario, Zelda, Mario Kart, Metroid, and Pokemon on a big screen. Lastly, there’s Touch controller support – as well as wireless Bluetooth controllers – so you can point and select menu items or move the windows.
As for the games themselves, Citra does provide a compatibility list as well as how to dump your games. This is the crucial factor, legally, you need to own the 3DS game and then use a hacked 3DS to load it onto a PC. There are, of course, 3DS game ROMs online which CitraVR does not endorse using. Furthermore, it’s worth pointing out that the emulator doesn’t support Nintendo DS games.
CitraVR will be available for free on 20th January via SideQuest and GitHub. If you’ve never sideloaded a game then check out our sideloading guide for SideQuest.
Will you be giving CitraVR a try this weekend? Let us know which games you’ll be playing first in the comments!
