About

This document provides a basic overview of libctr: what it is, what it is not, what it does, and explains the reasons behind several of its choices. After reading this, you should have a pretty good idea of whether or not libctr is what you are looking for - if it fits the bill.

Acknowledgment

libctr is heavily based off of ctrulib, by smealum.

Some parts of libctr were directly copied from ctrulib, and a large part of the libctr architecture was influenced by the inner workings of ctrulib.

libctr is based off of ctrulib, and would not exist without it.

Important Notice

The first and foremost disclaimer about libctr is this:

libctr is not a catch-all, end-all, be-all solution. Some users will be satisfied with libctr, others will be more satisfied with libctru (by smealum), and still other users will be dissatisfied with both.

There is nothing about libctr that makes it inherently better than libctru, or inherently worse. It simply targets a different set of goals.

In particular, because libctr is tailored towards application and game developers, system kernel-level homebrew like https://github.com/Myriachan/libkhax, https://github.com/shinyquagsire23/bootstrap, and https://github.com/StapleButter/Staplehax will never be portable from libctru to libctr. This is intentional, because libctr intentionally hides a number of details that libctru exposes directly. This is an architectural design tradeoff; by focusing only on what application developers use, we can eliminate a number of functions/params/values from libctr. This results in more readable code, better link-time optimizations, easier compile-time static checking, and easier maintainability. So the choice was made to exclude certain functionality from libctr, even if this does reduce the potential number of users and use-cases.

Overview

libctr is a library created by Alex Shaw (Symbitic) as part of OpenCTR. It is meant to be an open source alternative to Nintendo’s proprietary commercial SDK for the Nintendo 3DS handheld game console. It allows developers to create their own Nintendo 3DS homebrew, independent of Nintendo.