Galaxy S20 Ultra - New Update and Testing 3DS Emulation

I’ve been thinking of ways to enjoy my S20 Ultra over the last few weeks. It’s been fun tinkering with different apps and games. With lockdown in place, my photography outings have been limited. Software updates have been steadily coming in and I’ve been happy with the Snapdragon 865 on a daily basis. The latest update, “G98xxXXU2ATE6” was a pleasant surprise and there were a few cool improvements to the UI to make the phone feel a little zippier through animation disable options for the fingerprint scanner. Stability and usual bug fixes were of course bundled in there too. Android phones have come a long way in their capability, and its impressive how much multi-tasking can go on in the background before things start to get a little sluggish.

One of my favourite applications to load up on the go are emulators. I remember being able to play NES games on the Symbian OS. Gaming emulation on the go has come a long way over the years and I have been plenty satisfied with being able to play arcade and console classics on my phone. PlayStation, Dreamcast and many other systems run at an acceptable standard on many modern handsets. Perhaps one of the bigger surprises this month however, was the release of Citra’s first outing on Android. Citra is the first Nintendo 3DS console emulator, coming out in 2014. After almost 6 years, we are now able to run 3DS games on our mobile phones, something that I did not anticipate. I own a 3DS but it has been gathering dust for a number of years now. I have huge catalogue of games that I’ve not finished and despite being able to travel around with the portable gaming device, I would much rather pack my Nintendo Switch in its place. This is where emulators come in, having access to my 3DS library on my phone would make picking up titles much easier again as my daily driver gains access to an extensive catalogue.

Image – OoT from Citra blog. Tested and running full speed on my own device

I decided to give Citra’s first release a test. Not expecting much, I was ready for a steady 10 frames per second, choppy audio and general proof of concept that works but isn’t quite there. Loading up the emulator and a backup of Legend of Zelda: OoT, things were smooth, albeit with a small audio or video skip here and there. It was impressive. I was pretty amazed that I was playing a 3DS title on my phone in 2020. The Galaxy S20 Ultra is a beast and it really shines here. I suddenly realised that my phone was still running on a higher refresh rate, this was causing issues with gameplay. Reverting back to a standard refresh rate resolved all skips and gameplay was smooth and I was happy to test this for the next couple of hours. Overall, Citra on Android is a great experience on modern handsets, especially on the SD 865. I will be running some tests in the coming weeks and consider this to be an exciting opportunity to finally finish off a few forgotten titles at my own pace on my phone.

You can read about the release and grab Citra here:
https://citra-emu.org/entry/announcing-citra-android/

https://www.xda-developers.com/samsung-galaxy-s20-update-disable-fingerprint-animation-unlocking/

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