Emulators grow quickly. Last month alone, there were 39 pull requests merged to Citra. For this reason, it’s important to be able to manage the many different versions of an emulator. Until now however, Citra has had no installer or updater for the nightly builds. Although the now obsolete Bleeding Edge builds did have both of these things, it was limited to Windows, and the installer framework had some issues that restricted what we could do with it.

Thanks to the work by j-selby and jroweboy, we now have a new installer and updater for both the Nightly builds and the Canary builds!

More info on the Canary version of Citra will be in the September 2017 Progress Report.

Installer

The new installer is an application separate from Citra itself, that utilizes the Qt Installer Framework (Also known as QtIFW.) to download the latest version of either Citra Nightly or Citra Canary from our website’s repository and extract it to your system’s program directory.

Additionally, depending on which build(s) you chose, the installer will also create desktop icons for easy access. You can get the installer from the downloads page, which will try to automatically select the correct version for your OS.

Updater

In addition to installing, QtIFW also provides functionality for updating via the maintenancetool utility. For convenience, this is integrated into the Qt frontend (The main GUI that you probably use.) in the form of scheduled automatic updates. You can optionally check for updates on startup, and/or check for updates on shutdown.

If an update is found at startup, you will be asked if you want to run the updater or not.

If an update is found at shutdown, Citra will silently update without prompting, because at this point emulation has already been terminated.

You can also manually update your Citra installation at any time, by going to the Help menu, and then Check for Updates.

Uninstallation & Install Modification

QtIFW’s maintenancetool can also be used to uninstall Citra, and install a different type of build. Like the updater, this is also integrated into the Qt frontend, and can be accessed by going to the Help menu, and then Modify Citra Install. Integrating with an already well-established framework like QtIFW allows us to streamline the task of installation maintenence.