In the last quarter, we’ve further improved the speed and accuracy of citra along with supporting more 3DS features, and we are very excited to show what we’ve been working on. It’s a bit hard to believe, but Citra is already three years old, and in these three years we’ve gone from an emulator that could barely run homebrew, to one that can run many commercially available games at playable speeds!

Welcome to the first Citra Progress Report of 2016! While 2015 will be considered the year that Citra first played games, 2016 is quickly shaping up as a year filled with higher compatibility, greater stability and much more as Citra matures. The avalanche of new features from tons of contributors has made it hard to keep up with everything even for developers! Because there have been so many changes and there are so many different games, it can be very hard to keep up with what is working and what is not.

This month we bring you the second installment of our two-part progress report on Citra in 2015! With this part, we discuss the evolution from Citra being able to barely run a few commercial games at a few frames-per-second, to where it is in 2016: Running many retail games at reasonable speeds, some of which are fully playable with near flawless graphics! We discuss Citra’s new “dyncom” CPU core, the OpenGL renderer, per-pixel lighting, and various bug fixes.

While Citra was first founded in April of 2014, visible progress for the emulator didn’t really happen until the turn of the year. After a long struggle to get anything to boot, 2015 saw Citra evolve from an experimental emulator that couldn’t run games into an experimental emulator that can run games. And while it may not seem like Citra is that far along, it is truly amazing how much things have progressed in just a year since the first commercial title booted.