Archive of 3DS Documentation

For better or worse, there is no unified way of writing and collecting information gathered during research on 3DS software or hardware. This page hence seeks to gather a list of various places for 3DS documentation.

• A wiki dedicated to 3DS reverse-engineering

• fincs’s notes on various PICA200 features: Procedural texture generation, shadow mapping, gaseous rendering

  • mike’s transcript of the gaseous rendering patent
    • wwylele’s diagram of gaseous rendering based on the said patent

• Subv’s notes on the kernel scheduler implementation

• DMP’s academic publications and other presentations about their GPU:

  • Procedural texture generation
  • Ohbuchi and Unno - “A Real-Time Configurable Shader Based on Lookup Tables”
  • Kazakov and Ohbuchi - “Primitive Processing and Advanced Shading Architecture for Embedded Space” (note there is a public presentation with this title, but all the interesting stuff is outlined in a paywalled academic publications with the same title)

• wwylele’s notes on CRO

• wwylele’s notes on GPU_LUTINPUT_CP and tangent mapping

• shinyquagsire23’s writeup about how updates work

• SciresM’s reddit posts:

  • https://www.reddit.com/r/3dshacks/comments/56lk5p/game_ncch_and_cdn_encryption_an_explanation/
  • https://www.reddit.com/r/SwitchHacks/comments/759myu/the_eshop_and_cdn_explained_switch_edition/

• wwylele’s 3ds save format documentation (migrated to 3dbrew)

• wwylele’s doc on CEC (WIP)

• wwylele’s note on region manifest archive format

• wwylele’s misc diagram on 3DS stuff (gas, memory, ncch, pica pipeline)