Nintendo 3DS

SDL port for the Nintendo 3DS Homebrew toolchain contributed by:

• Pierre Wendling

Credits to:

• The awesome people who ported SDL to other homebrew platforms.
• The Devkitpro team for making all the tools necessary to achieve this.

Building

To build for the Nintendo 3DS, make sure you have devkitARM and cmake installed and run:

cmake -S. -Bbuild -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE="$DEVKITPRO/cmake/3DS.cmake" -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cmake --build build
cmake --install build

Notes

• Currently only software rendering is supported.
• SDL3_main should be used to ensure ROMFS is enabled - this is done with #include <SDL3/SDL_main.h> in the source file that contains your main function.
• By default, the extra L2 cache and higher clock speeds of the New 2/3DS lineup are enabled. If you wish to turn it off, use osSetSpeedupEnable(false) in your main function.
• SDL_GetBasePath returns the romfs root instead of the executable's directory.
• The Nintendo 3DS uses a cooperative threading model on a single core, meaning a thread will never yield unless done manually through the SDL_Delay functions, or blocking waits (SDL_LockMutex, SDL_WaitSemaphore, SDL_WaitCondition, SDL_WaitThread). To avoid starving other threads, SDL_TryWaitSemaphore and SDL_WaitSemaphoreTimeout will yield if they fail to acquire the semaphore, see https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/pull/6776 for more information.