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Emulator Raikopon

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digdat0 edited this page Jul 24, 2026 · 1 revision

Systems: Nintendo 3DS (3ds) · Runs as: homebrew NRO · Get it: github.com/Raibatsu/raikopon (releases)

Best effort: this guide is community-maintained and may lag behind new releases. The emulator's own site (linked above) is the authoritative source — if anything here doesn't match what you see, trust their instructions.

Raikopon is a Nintendo 3DS emulator for the Switch, and a fork of Dekopon — which is itself a fork of Azahar, in the Citra lineage. It's the more actively developed of the two right now: releases have been landing every day or two through July 2026, and the current build is v1.3.0-rai (23 July 2026). Like Dekopon it boots and runs games at mostly full speed, and it adds a tabbed touch UI, a much better shader-cache scheme, per-game cheats, texture filters, and a pile of per-game performance switches.

It moves fast enough that details here will drift — check the repo when something doesn't line up.

Install

  1. Download the latest release .nro from the releases page and copy it to sd:/switch/.
  2. Launch it from the homebrew menu.

Note the shared data folder: Raikopon keeps its data under sd:/switch/dekopon/, the same path its parent uses. If you have both installed they share one config, one save folder, and one shader cache. That's convenient if you're switching between them to compare, but it does mean a settings change in one shows up in the other — and it's worth backing up sd:/switch/dekopon/ before you try a new build.

Point it at your HaulNX library

  1. Download 3DS games with HaulNX — they land in sd:/roms/3ds/.
  2. Open Raikopon's settings and find the ROM folder path (it defaults to sd:/switch/dekopon/roms/).
  3. Set it to sd:/roms/3ds.

Your library shows up in the game list from then on, and new HaulNX downloads appear on the next launch. The v1.3.0 UI reorganized settings into tabs, so the exact wording may differ from older guides — look for the paths tab.

Format notes

  • Use bare ROM files (.3ds/.cci cartridge dumps). If a game came down as a .zip, extract it in place first.
  • .cia (eShop-style installable) content goes through the built-in CIA installation rather than the ROM folder.
  • Some titles want system files or keys dumped from a real 3DS, as with Azahar upstream. The repo's docs are the authority on what to dump and where it goes.

Tips

  • Shader stutter is mostly a first-run problem now. Earlier builds threw away the shader cache whenever new shaders appeared, so every restart recompiled from zero; v1.3.0 only compiles what's actually new. Expect a compilation screen the first time through a game and much less of it afterwards. There's a per-game delete shader cache option in the menu if one goes bad.
  • Try the debug switches on a slow game. Skip Slow Draw, Skip Texture Copy, and Skip CPU Write each trade accuracy for speed, and which one helps is very game-dependent. Disabling right-eye rendering is a cheap win too — the Switch only shows one eye regardless.
  • Screen layout matters a lot. The 3DS's two screens have to share one, and the right choice varies per game. Layouts, button remapping, and gyro are all in the settings.
  • Texture packs: keep them modest. 1080p is the practical ceiling; large packs can exhaust RAM and take the emulator down.
  • Cheats (Gateway / Action Replay format), LayeredFS mods, and texture packs live under sd:/switch/dekopon/ in folders named by the game's 16-character Title ID. Cheats have a per-game menu in-app.
  • An overclock helps here as much as anywhere — 3DS is one of the demanding systems on this hardware.
  • Report port bugs to Raikopon, not Azahar. The upstream project doesn't support the Switch port and asks not to be contacted about it.

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