Let's work together: The Developer Edition goes public!

We are happy to announce the immediate release of Mikage Developer Edition! This is the majority of the emulator core, capable of running many games and system software. For everyone interested in helping get their favorite game running in Mikage, this is an opportunity to participate in development. All improvements will go right into the shared code base.

This source release of over 50.000 lines of C++ code includes the following:

• a fully custom ARM11 interpreter
• Vulkan-powered emulation of the PICA200 GPU
• high-level-emulation of the 3DS kernel
• over 20 HLE service modules
• a hypervisor layer for debugging
• TeakLite emulation based on Teakra
• ... and, like, so much more

NOTE: This is not a user-oriented build and hence will not receive any support. This helps channel our efforts effectively and reduce overhead where possible. At the time of writing, there are no public user builds of Mikage. Anyone claiming to provide Mikage builds is either spreading malware or deceiving you.

User vs Developer Edition: What's the difference?

As the name says, the target audience of the Developer Edition is developers. It provides a fully functional environment with nearly the same compatibility as the internal build, which provides an excellent platform to join development and fix issues in the common core shared by the two editions.

In contrast, emulator users generally expect to see optimal performance, an intuitive user interface, and convenience features like snapshots. These features aren't essential or helpful for development. To make it clear that the Developer Edition is for developers, no attempt is made to ship such features or provide binaries. This also helps create a safe environment for collaborators to avoid ill-intended third-parties.

Why this distinction?

3DS emulation has found itself in an unsustainable situation (head over to emucross for details) that discourages developers from contributing and openly collaborating. We want to do better: After considering different approaches and gathering feedback from several groups of people, the Developer Edition is the best compromise between openness and safety of developers.

We are aware that people will ultimately distribute binaries of the Developer Edition anyway. These people are doing a disservice by tricking users into downloading builds that will only waste their time (and possibly ship malware). If the problem spirals out of control, we'll have to abandon the Developer Edition and find a different approach. You now know who to blame if this happens.

By Developers for Developers: Learn and Discuss

If you haven't been scared away until this point - great! Let's work together and make Mikage the best 3DS emulator it could possibly be. If you want to get started, head over to GitHub and try building the emulator yourself.

A useful thing to try is to throw your favorite games in and see if they bring up any error messages that can easily be fixed. Additionally, the issue tracker already has many suggestions for impactful improvements. Before tackling any bigger projects it's best to reach out to us first though.

As part of this release, we're also opening up our communication platform: For interactive discussion, join us on Matrix!

Thanks to supporters

Finally, thanks to our Sponsor-level supporters on Patreon, including:

• Francisco Garcia
• Ivy
• Mr. Madness
• Pretendo Network