VS Code Template for devkitPro 3DS Development

Premade Visual Studio Code configuration files to aid in devkitPro 3DS development.

If you've been struggling to get devkitPro correctly setup with VS Code, this template will do that and more!

Features

• It will solve devkitPro libraries not picking up
• Automatically build from source and then emulate
• Automatically build and run on hardware.

Setup

Caution

Make sure you have already setup devkitPro exactly as described in this Nintendo 3DS Homebrewing - Getting Started Guide By Drake Rochelle. It is not just downloading and running the installer. Once you have followed the guide, you may realise that some libraries are still not found when running make. I've discovered that reinstalling any missing libs resolves this issue: pacman -S citro2d

To use the template, all you gotta do is download the folder and rename it from "template" to your chosen project name. This will solve the libraries not being recognised. If you don't want the other automation features, you can delete both the launch.json and task.json files.

Library Detection

Libraries should be recognised without any need to setup. However, if VS Code still doesn't recognise the libraries, you can edit the C/C++ extension settings.json to include:

{
    "C_Cpp.default.includePath": [
        "${workspaceFolder}\\**",
        "C:\\devkitPro\\**",
        "C:\\devkitPro\\libctru\\include\\**",
        "C:\\devkitPro\\devkitARM\\include\\**",
        "C:\\devkitPro\\devkitARM\\arm-none-eabi\\include\\**",
        "C:\\devkitPro\\devkitARM\\lib\\gcc\\arm-none-eabi\\**",
        "C:\\devkitPro\\portlibs\\3ds\\include\\**"
    ],
}

Emulation

The emulation launch task will prompt VS Code to automatically build (using "make") and run the resulting .3dsx file in a 3DS emulator, which you have to link yourself in the launch.json file. Put your path to .exe there and you should be good to go!

3DS Link

There is another configuration which will make testing on real hardware much faster. This will automate the use of the 3dslink tool which comes bundled with devkitPro's 3ds-dev environment.

Setting the environment variable

In order to get this working I highly suggest you make the tool a system-wide path variable so that it may be used from any location on the terminal.

Note

If you don't want to do this for some reason, you'll have to edit the "3dslink" command to "C:\devkitPro\tools\bin\3dslink.exe" in the launch.json

Let's break it down:

1. First add 3dstool.exe as an environment variable. I did this in my User Path. The fastest way to get there is to press 🪟 Win + R on your keyboard and paste SystemPropertiesAdvanced
2. Then press the Environment Variables button
3. A new window will pop up. Under "User variables for...", double click on the "Path" variable
4. Another window should open with a list of user path variables, double click on the blank space under the list and paste C:\devkitPro\tools\bin to add it to your Path
5. Press OK on all aforementioned windows
6. You can check you've done it correctly by typing in any cmd "3dslink" and hitting enter. It should output the version number with the help commands

Usage

Now that we can actually use the tool, we must edit the launch.json to include our own 3DS's IP Address.

1. You can get this by opening the homebrew menu app on your modded 3DS and pressing Y (or X). You must do this everytime you would like to use 3dslink.
2. Go to the launch.json and replace 3ds.ip.address.123 with your actual IP
3. Save file changes and smile, because we're done :)

Now when we try run the project we can safely choose the option "3dslink: Build & Run on Hardware".

Example

From here on out you can do whatever you like with these files, get creative with it and make more configs. I personally have one for my emulator of choice, one for linking to my New 2DS XL and another for my New 3DS LL:

VS Code Theme: Catppuccin Frappé