Azahar Emulator is the new best hope for Nintendo 3DS emulation

There’s new hope in the world of Nintendo 3DS emulation! While a few forks have popped up in the wake of Citra’s shutdown earlier this year, this new project is the first one with real hope of building on its legacy.

Azahar Emulator (pronounced ah-thah-ahr) is a new Citra fork that merges the Lime3DS and PabloMK7’s Citra fork. Azahar is Spanish for “orange blossom,” which is a nice nod to the original project while still signaling a new era.

Here is the full announcement from X:

This collaboration was first announced last month, but this is the first official news about the project. For now, there’s no new Nintendo 3DS emulator to speak of, so you’ll have to download one of the older forks to revisit your favorite N3DS games. However, neither is still under active development, with all open pull requests now closed.

Nintendo closed the eShop for the 3DS and Wii U in March of last year, which may help this project escape Nintendo’s legal wrath. Citra itself was only discontinued because it shared the same development team as the Nintendo Switch emulator Yuzu. The emulator itself is open-source, which is why so many forks exist in the first place.

The official Azahar Emulator website is still barebones, but you can find the latest on X or Bluesky. We’ll keep a close eye on this one, so stay tuned for more news soon.