3DS Emulators, eMu3Ds are fakes

Posted: Saturday 13 October 2012

2016

Thanks to (1) Smealum's (smea) creation and effort on the 3DS Homebrew, IronHax and Ninjhax - which all enable running homebrew programs straight off a physical 3DS device (http://smealum.github.io/3ds/),
(2) archshift's work on Decrypt9 and xorer - which decrypts 3DS roms by first generating a xorpad (from a 3DS device) and applying that to the 3DS rom (on a Desktop),
and (3) work that has been completed with Citra http://citra-emu.org/ https://github.com/citra-emu/citra - emulating the 3DS' ARM11 CPU and more importantly PICA200 GPU,
Commercial 3DS rom emulation is possible!
Only took 3-4 years!

Jump links

Skip the initial proof that was posted in 2012
Skip to a collection of fakes similar to this
Skip to the Hackingnation analysis
Update: The "3DS Emulator 1.1.7" fakeware has been renamed to eMu3Ds 0.9.5.2, see what has changed here: Changelog
Hey look. Exceptions have started to pop up. Progress has been made with Citra regarding commercial 3DS software and games. It's fundamentally an ARM emulator that's re-purposed for the 3DS, which is different then a non-functional shell: http://citra-emu.org/, https://github.com/citra-emu/citra

2014

The Gist

This whole post started out with 3DSEmulator.org. 2 years ago, 3DSEmulator.org was a scam. Like an pesky introduced species, the authors keep on evolving their scam and it continues to live on, years after the initial 3DS hype, and still is a scam.
Even today, 3DSEmulator.org remains to be a fake, and unfortunately, have evolved their tactics to be more then just an annoyance, but more of a malice.
To be as blunt as possible, eMu3Ds (from the aforementioned site) is a fake, YouTube videos related to this whole phenomena are fake.

2014

Be Skeptical

With YouTube videos, sometimes the scams are extremely obvious. Others - you might have to think twice and be amazed by how the 3DS graphics can be shown in a 2D video, or about how powerful that the computers that run these supposed programs are.
Monitoring the progress of the whole situation, it seems like copycats looking to exploit users and "offering" the same as 3DSEmulator.org are popping up.
3DSEmulator.org is still the #1 site when you search "3ds emulator", but now it's accompanied by other sites that are similarly deceptive.

With the development of Citra, it is clear that even a small factorial alongside OpenGL homebrew code takes time to run. (though, commercial games appear to be feasible).
So imagine these so-called "Commercial 3DS Emulators", that claim to emulate a magnititude of high-quality 3DS games. Then think twice about how "legit" these applications are.

2014

A solution!

If you want a homebrew 3DS Emulator, then the following emulator can suit your needs: https://github.com/bunnei/citra/
It doesn't offer the ability to emulate commercial 3DS games, but it's better then finding out that you have a magnitude of riskware installed onto your computer.

2014

Don't install eMu3DS!

Instead of being plain dodgy, eMu3DS is now no-longer downloaded as an archive. At the original date of posting (2012), it was fairly harmless to fall for the deceitful program.
Now, the program is bundled full of joy-
if you consider having your computer hi-jacked by malware and constantly bombarded with adware joyful.