Preparing your 3DS!

Though it is entirely possible to develop homebrew for the 3DS without actually testing it on the 3DS, it is not very wise. The emulators that exist right now are to far from perfect to expect the results in the emulator to be the same as those on actual hardware. This tutorial will teach you how to get any homebrew including your own to run on your 3DS.

Input, touch and buttons!

So we might have gotten a little ahead of ourselves, we got things displayed on the screen, but there is still no user input (except the fact that if you press start you’ll return to the menu). In this tutorial we will learn how to read user input!

Rendering an image!

Though you might be able to make a great game or app using just the console, the best looking games and apps usually use images! In this tutorial you’ll be learning how to render images to the screen on the 3DS using sf2dlib. sf2dlib allows you to use hardware rendering, here is a post of mine about the difference between hardware rendering and software rendering.

Making your Hello World!

Like anywhere else the first program we’ll be making will be a simple hello world! In this tutorial you’ll learn how to use the console (not the 3DS but the text console), and how to make a custom SMDH file.

Setting up sf2dlib!

Before we will actually start coding we will setup one more thing. Even though technically you can start developing for the 3DS without this library it’s highly recommended that you install it anyway. Though we will start using the library once we are going into graphics thus you won’t need it for the first 2 tutorials on actual coding.

Setting up development environment (Linux)

For Linux you’ll also be using DevKitPro, but unlike for Windows there is no easy installer. You can go to the 3dbrew.org page and follow the instructions there on how to setup the environment for Linux: http://3dbrew.org/wiki/Setting_up_Development_Environment#Linux

Setting up development environment (Windows)

Before we can start coding we first have to setup the environment that we can develop in. As homebrew is not officially supported by Nintendo you will not be downloading any SDK from Nintendo. Instead we are going to be using DevKitPro.