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PCPortpt
Emulator

Mikage

Nintendo 3DS Mikage running on PC through emulator. Free and complete.

How this port works

This is an emulator: it recreates the whole console in software and runs the original game unmodified. It asks more of your machine than a native port, but it serves the console's entire library rather than one game.

Mikage Developer Edition

How to install

  1. 01This is the Developer Edition of Mikage, a Nintendo 3DS emulator: there is no prebuilt release here, you compile it.
  2. 02To build it you need CMake and Conan 2. The route is to make a build folder, run conan install .. -of . --build=missing, configure CMake with the Conan toolchain and Ninja, then ninja && sudo ninja install. On Linux the Vulkan libraries are also required and Conan does not build them.
  3. 03If you have GCC 15 or newer, the Conan step may fail because of a change in the default compilation flags: add tools.build:cflags=["-std=gnu17"] under [conf] in your Conan profile and try again.
  4. 04The first launch requires three things in place: a complete aes_keys.txt in the build folder, a virtual NAND bootstrapped from a game update partition, and the 3DS initial system setup run.
  5. 05The last two come from a single command, given a game with an update partition: ./source/mikage game.cci --bootstrap_nand --launch_menu. Today this probably requires a game of the EU region.
  6. 06Once set up, ./source/mikage game.cci or ./source/mikage --launch_menu is enough. Either way, run source conanrun.sh first so the library directories are found.
  7. 07The controls are mapped unusually: the right, down, up and left arrows are A, B, X and Y; WASD is the circle pad; IJKL is the d-pad; Q and E are L and R; Enter is START, Shift is SELECT, and Backspace is HOME (press twice to power down).

These projects ship no game data. Supply your own copy.

Frequently asked

Do I need the original game to play Mikage on PC?

No. Mikage is free and complete: download the release and run it, with no ROM, dump or commercial game copy.

What does "emulator" mean?

This is an emulator: it recreates the whole console in software and runs the original game unmodified. It asks more of your machine than a native port, but it serves the console's entire library rather than one game.

Will Mikage run on a low-end PC?

Native ports and recompilations skip CPU emulation entirely, so they are usually far lighter than an emulator for the same console. With no published measurement for this project, though, any estimate would be guesswork — test it on your own machine.

Which systems does it support?

The current release ships builds for Windows. The game originally shipped on Nintendo 3DS.

Is it legal to use?

The project is public and open source, maintained by mikage-emu, and contains nothing from the commercial game. Responsibility for the game copy you use is yours — which is why the developers require you to supply your own.