3DS Homebrew Browser
Download homebrew from the internet!
What does this do?
The homebrew browser allows for easy loading of new homebrew software onto a homebrew enabled 3DS. You should already be able to run the Homebrew Menu/Launcher to run this code. Your 3DS should be connected to the internet for this to work.
How to use
Drop the homebrew-browser folder into the /3ds directory on your 3DS's SD card. Don't rename the folder or the application - there are some paths that are presently hard-coded and rely on these paths existing.
The basic use of the browser is via the +Pad or OPad and the A button. Use the pad to navigate up and down the list, and the A button to download the highlighted app. The L and R buttons filter by category - they are games, media, emulators, utility, and miscellaneous. Select will change the sort order. X opens the debug console on the top screen.
Similarly, the main controls can be touched as well - to navigate, drag the scroll bar. To download a title, tap on it.
Submitting/removing an app
Presently, the server's source is not yet available, but if you would like your app to show up in the browser, please send an email to [email protected]. We may add apps that are licensed with GPL or other distribution-friendly licensing automatically; if it's popular and announced publically, we'll probably add it for you. If you would like your app removed or some detail about its listing changed, don't hesitate to contact us.
Warning - this is early stage software!
This code was written relatively quickly, meaning that there's not a whole lot of error checking. We plan to smooth this out as time goes on and we continue to work on it, but realize that it is still subject to lock ups and freezing - particularly regarding network operations.
The early nature of this software also means that while, theoretically, the Homebrew Browser should be able to download itself to upgrade to newer versions, the API may change, breaking backwards compatibility, requiring a manual upgrade. We will try to avoid this until the API solidifies, but until then, this is a potential issue.
Planned features
Custom homebrew sources, so that people can easily host their own app repositories. Release of the server source code. Building There is a Dockerfile available, which will set up the development environment using Docker. If you prefer to get set up manually, you'll need devkitARM r43 and a recent ctrulib - this was developed against a recent pull of its master branch.
Once the environment is set up, just run make. It will generate homebrew-browser.3dsx and homebrew-browser.smdh, which can be loaded onto the SD card using your preferred method so that the Homebrew Menu/Launcher can run it.
BMFont is used to generate the font atlases as PNGs and offset information as fnt files. The fnt file is already pre-generated, and has been passed through tools/convert-fnt.py and stored in the repo as C++ source files.
Images are manually run through tools/image-to-3ds.py script, which converts them to a raw BGR image with some metadata prepended.
Bugs and feature requests
We are using the issues on this repository to keep track of things that need to be done. Whether there's something you'd like to see or something doesn't work quite right, please open an issue there and we'll take a look at it.
License
The license for the source is a standard BSD 3-clause license with an additional clause to make explicit our desire that this software not be used for piracy. The full license, including additional clause, is in the LICENSE file.
The font used throughout the app is the Ubuntu font. The original TTF files and license are in assets/fonts.
Credits
cromo for the initial development zeta0134 for development on both the client and server smealum, fincs, and gemisis for the SMDH reading code, which was taken from the Homebrew Menu/Launcher smealum, whose code was used as a basis for the font file converter