Ironhax/Tubehax slow GBA emulation and the reason why.

So you finally got a hack for your 3DS because you missed out on cubic ninja before the prices went through the roof and you’re all psyched about the fact you’re going to get to relive your youth and pour hours upon hours of your life into GBA games that you once loved such as Gen 3 Pokémon, Chain of Memories and Advanced Wars (to name a few). You get your emulator up and running and holy heck, is it’s slow. Now you’re wondering if it’s your bios or your homebrew launcher or god knows what, right? Yeah, I was in the same position until I came across this comment from shinyquagsire23 (the dev behind CitrAGB):





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Dynrec only works on o3DS and N3DS on versions 9.2 and below with Ninjhax 1.0. As of now, the module which does kernel hax, libkhax, is broken under ninjhax 2, and as such 9.2 and below units with this version of ninjhax will fail to gain kernel access and fail to launch. Hence the current 3dsx which forces interpreter mode for now. So dynrec will not be a thing on 9.3-9.9 unless new arm11 kernel exploits are found.


I actually tried getting dynrec working for 9.2 and below peeps on CFW, assuming the CFW disabled SVC checks. However I’m being plagued with icache issues the same as libkhax, even if I force a complete icache clear. It’s strange.


So basically what this means is that those of us who have updated their console to be able to access the eShop to be able to download the YouTube and Ironfall applications are in rather an unfortunate position until a hack with kernel access is released on firmware 9.3+ and as much as I hate to be the bearer of bad news, the likelihood of this (at least from what I have gathered) seems to be relatively slim.


It isn’t all doom and gloom though. You can of course run all the homebrew found on 3dbrew and there are a few diligent users of GBATemp who have been testing various GBA roms using CitrAGB in its current state and have found that there are games that are playable and have created a list: http://pastebin.com/cNSun3JK

If you wish to contribute to this list contact Greymane on GBATemp: https://gbatemp.net/members/greymane.368011/

http://wololo.net/2015/08/20/ironhax...lation-reason/