Panda3DS - Mac
Panda3DS is an HLE, red-panda-themed Nintendo 3DS emulator written in C++ which started out as a fun project out of curiosity, but evolved into something that can sort of play games!
Compatibily has gotten pretty good in the past couple of months. The only caveat is that the emulator still does not have sound.
The download includes both the Qt and SDL versions.
Allthough the emulator runs well on my Windows and Linux systems, it ran extremely slow on my Mac Mini M2.
How to use
Simply drag and drop a ROM to the executable if supported, or invoke the executable from the command line with the path to the ROM as the first argument like: Alber.exe MyGame.3ds
Panda3DS can load ROMs in the following formats:
- .3ds/.cci
- .cxi/.app
- .elf/.axf
- .3dsx
Both decrypted and encrypted dumps are supported. However for encrypted dumps you must provide your AES keys file by adding a sysdata folder to the emulator's app data directory with a file called aes_keys.txt including your keys. Currently .cia files are not supported yet (support is planned for the future), however if you want you can usually use Citra to extract the .app/.cxi file out of your .cia and run that.
Controls
Keyboard & Mouse
- Up analog W
- Down analog S
- Left analog A
- Right analog D
- D-pad Arrows
- A button L
- B button K
- X button O
- Y button I
- L button Q
- R button P
- Start button Enter
- Select button Backspace
- Touch Screen Left click
- Gyroscope Hold right click and swipe your mouse left and right (support is kind of shaky atm, but games that require gyro here and there like Kirby should work)
- Pause/Resume F4
- Reload F5
Panda3DS also supports controller input using the SDL2 GameController API.