Retroid Pocket Duo and AYN Thor get Nintendo 3DS performance upgrade and new features

After Citra was discontinued, Azahar filled the gap in early 2025. With the launch of more and more dual-screen gaming handhelds, 3DS emulation is becoming increasingly relevant, and Azahar now aims to improve both performance and convenience when playing Nintendo 3DS games on Android handhelds such as the Retroid Pocket Duo or the AYN Thor.

The release candidate for version 2127.0 recently published on GitHub shows which improvements users of this emulator can expect soon. The highlight of the new version is support for the Android Dynamic Performance Framework (ADPF), which is expected to boost performance on handhelds with an ARM Mali graphics chip by up to 15 percent. In addition, it is now possible to load custom drivers for GPUs from manufacturers other than Qualcomm – a useful feature, as higher-performance community drivers are available for many chips.

The update also introduces a range of quality-of-life features, led by the ability to save settings separately for each game rather than using the same settings for all titles. This is particularly useful on midrange hardware such as the Retroid Pocket Duo, which can handle some less demanding 3DS games at four times the resolution on each axis, but can only run some titles at two to three times the resolution. If a game is launched via a shortcut on the Android home screen and then exited, Azahar will now close completely as well.

Files and folders whose names begin with a period can now be ignored when scanning for ROM files to hide macOS or Linux system files. The patch also includes numerous bug fixes. Although the latest version is not yet available on the Google Play Store, the second release candidate has already been published, so the launch of the final version should not be far off.