A port of VoxelCore — an open-source voxel engine by MihailRis — to the original Nintendo 3DS: ARM11 @ 268 MHz, 128 MB RAM, PICA200 GPU, no OpenGL, no OpenAL, and a screen the size of a matchbox.
This was made just for fun, to find out whether a modern desktop voxel engine can run on a 2011 handheld at all. It can.
voxelcore3ds.3dsx— run via Homebrew Launcher, or open directly in the Azahar emulator.- Every push also produces a fresh
voxelcore3dsartifact in Actions. - A CIA can be packaged with
3ds/cia/build_cia.sh(requires makerom).
| Feature | Status |
|---|---|
| World generation, loading, saving (SD card) | ✅ works |
| Survival and creative modes | ✅ works |
| Block placing / breaking, vertex lighting | ✅ works |
| Engine GUI on the touch screen (inventory, hotbar, tabs) | ✅ works |
| Tap-to-select hotbar, touch menu | ✅ works |
| Entity models (drops, falling blocks, mobs) | ✅ works |
| Item throwing (SELECT) | ✅ works |
| Audio: NDSP backend, ogg via stb_vorbis | ✅ works |
| Content packs from SD | ✅ works |
| Lua scripting (LuaJIT interpreter, no-FFI fallbacks) | ✅ works |
| Fog, dense-pass leaves alpha, underwater tint, backlight | ✅ works |
| In-game chat rendering | |
| CIA packaging in CI | |
| Particles, 3D text, block wraps, post-effects | ❌ not ported |
| Networking / multiplayer | ❌ not ported |
| Advanced render (shadows, SSAO, clouds) | ❌ out of scope for this GPU |
| Stereoscopic 3D on the top screen | ❌ not yet |
| New 3DS speedup (804 MHz / L2) | ❌ not yet |
Verified in Azahar (stable ~60 FPS UI, playable world at load distance 4).
The engine core is used as-is — the port patches only 26 lines of engine
code (guarded by VC_PORT_3DS). Everything else lives under 3ds/:
- Renderer: custom PICA200 renderer written against GPU registers
(no citro3d, no OpenGL). The engine's whole GUI stack (Batch2D, fonts,
DrawContext) renders on the bottom screen via
VC_NO_GL. - Audio: NDSP backend plugged into the engine's
VC_AUDIO_CUSTOM_BACKENDhook instead of OpenAL. - Memory profile: chunk height 128 (instead of 256), lazy chunk pool, 24 px item icons — via the engine's build-time knobs. That's the difference between running and OOM on 128 MB.
- Scripting: LuaJIT in interpreter mode (no RWX pages on 3DS), with pure-Lua fallbacks for everything that normally needs the FFI.
- Both screens: top — 3D world (400×240), bottom — full engine GUI (320×240)
- Touch screen for all UI interaction (inventory, hotbar, menus)
- PICA200 vertex shaders (
3ds/shaders/*.v.pica), native texture tiling - DSP (NDSP) for audio mixing (needs a dspfirm dump on real hardware)
- SD card for worlds, content packs and logs; RomFS for engine assets
- HID: buttons, D-pad, circle pad
- Maybe someday: stereoscopic 3D, New 3DS clock boost, local wireless
Docker is the only requirement (devkitPro image is pulled automatically):
git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/niazlv/voxelcore-3ds.git
cd voxelcore-3ds
./3ds/build.shOutput: 3ds/build/voxelcore3ds.3dsx. LuaJIT is cross-compiled automatically
on first build (see 3ds/build_luajit.sh for the
exact configuration). Port internals are described in
3ds/README.md.
main = upstream VoxelCore + a set of platform-independent fixes and
portability mechanisms + the 3ds/ tree. The platform-independent part
(alignment UB in gzip, null-deref fixes, building without OpenGL/OpenAL,
Lua-without-FFI fallbacks, memory-profile build knobs, small-screen UI) was
offered upstream as MihailRis/voxelcore#889;
it was declined — additional platform support is not currently planned there —
so those changes live in this repository (and in the
portability branch
of my fork) instead.
For the engine itself — documentation, content packs, scripting API — see the upstream repository and its docs.
- MihailRis — VoxelCore itself
- devkitPro / libctru — 3DS toolchain
- LuaJIT, EnTT, GLM, stb — bundled third-party libraries
License: same as upstream VoxelCore.