In a few days Nintendo will completely close the digital stores, the so-called eShop, for the retired consoles 3DS and WiiU and, therefore, it will be difficult to be able to play some games. More now with the speculation of the copies in physical format that is rampant that has deprived many people with few resources to be able to complete the collections of our games. Luckily we have our PC and emulators. But what do we need?
Both consoles, despite the success of the laptop, were a setback for the Kyoto company and in both cases they have been replaced by the Nintendo Switch. Both in the case of Wii U and 3DS, their two differential elements, the differential elements of both were not accepted by the majority of people. For one thing, the laptop’s stereo 3D screen had very low resolution and the sawtooth hurt the eyes. As for the desktop console, the capabilities of its screen control controller were hardly used and it is considered one of the biggest failures in history.
What do I need to be able to emulate the 3DS and Wii U consoles?
Yesterday we told you that the Wii U could stop working, today we have to remember that in a short time it will be impossible to connect to the digital store of the console since Nintendo will close them. Our recommendation? Pull Citra, the 3DS emulator and CEMU, the Wii U emulator to continue enjoying these games and with higher quality in frame rate and resolution than the original systems.
We wanted to focus on the PC you will need to play Wii U and 3DS games in Full HD and at 60 FPS. After all, it is a much higher resolution than both consoles offer and we will focus especially on the desktop console as it has much more power and, therefore, requires more for emulation.
- 3DS runs your games in a single thread of execution, so regardless of the number of cores your processor has, you should give importance to the IPC. So a Zen 2 or an Intel Core 10 forward is what we recommend and avoid any processor below 2 GHz or that has the Pentium or Celeron brand.
- Wii U, on the other hand, uses a triple core configuration, so if you want a computer capable of running both emulators without problems, then we recommend using a quad core cpus of the same nature as in the previous point.
- The other issue is RAM. although the original console only has 2 GB of RAM, we recommend you use a dual-channel 8 GB configuration. Although if you can put 16 GB in it, we don’t know the reason behind it, but it seems that having more memory helps the emulator.
What graphics card do I need to play these emulators?
Of course, the important thing here is the graphics card that we are going to use. There is no doubt that the most demanding game on the console is Breath of the Wild. All this under an Intel Core i5-10400F as the central processor, of which not even 30% is used, and running the game at 1920 x 1080 pixels. We recommend using Vulkan and the capacity, the multithread support in the emulator options in order to take better advantage of said capacity in the processor and graphics card.
- First of all, the NVIDIA RTX 3050 it reaches 90 FPS on average without problems, without ever dropping below 75 FPS and with an occupation of less than 70%.
- Curiously, the GTX 1650, the most used graphics card at the moment. It has operating times very similar to those of the previous card. We have to clarify that despite having more calculation units, it has the same number of cores and possibly this is what the emulator is measuring for us.
As for Citra, with less machine than what we have told you for its contemporary, you will be able to play all of its games without problems, so we are not going to be redundant in this regard.
How much would the minimum setup cost us?
It has given us to look at it on Amazon and PCComponentes to give you a more approximate idea. Obviously, we recommend a much more powerful PC than what you see here. In any case, we have not included a power supply and tower, since we do not know if you are going to use it for much heavier tasks. This is more of a guide to the PC needed to move graphics on Wii U.
