TinyVNC 3DS

TinyVNC
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General
Author	Badda
Type	Other Apps
Version	v1.0
Last Updated	2020/10/12
Links
Download
Website
Source

This ist the first (hopefully) stable release of TinyVNC, a VNC viewer for Nintendo 3DS. With this homebrew software, you can connect to any computer running a VNC server, see the screen contents and control it with your 3DS. From Wikipedia: "VNC (Virtual Network Computing) is a graphical desktop-sharing system [...] to remotely control another computer. It transmits the keyboard and mouse events from one computer to another, relaying the graphical-screen updates back in the other direction, over a network". Contrary to RDP (which is Microsoft only), it is platform-independent and thus works with Windows, Linux, MacOS, Android and many more ...!

I tested TinyVNC with Windows and with multiple VNC servers. TightVNC (https://www.tightvnc.com/) server seems to work best. Even streaming videos or games works well (as can be seen in my controversial video playing "Breath of the Wild" on my 3DS).

My recommendation is, to have the VNC server running in a virtual machine because there, you can freely define the server display resolution. Maximum supported server resolution is 1024x1024px - anything larger cannot fit into a 3DS texture buffer and thus cannot be rendered to the 3DS screen. As a rule of thumb: the larger the server display resolution, the worse the performance. This is because the server display is transferred to the 3DS in full and TinyVNC scales the image to fit the 400x240px 3DS screen. AFAIK, the only server supporting server side scaling is UltraVNC which does not perform well with TinyVNC, so I did not include that feature.

From my experience, a server resolution of 800x480 is great for web browsing etc, but for video- or game streaming, the server should have a display resolution of 400x240px or even less. Audio streaming is supported (mp3 over HTTP) but requires an additional server software running on the VNC server machine. This can be easily setup using VLC media player (https://www.videolan.org/vlc/). Below is a short tutorial how to do that.

Screenshots

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Audio server setup with VLC on Win10

I. Set up an audio device that captures all your system sounds

1. Go to Start Menu and search for "Control Panel", open the Control Panel
2. Go to menu "Hardware and Sound" -> "Manage audio devices" and choose tab "Recording"
3. Right-click in the list of recording devices and check "Show disabled devices"
4. Check if you have a "Stereo Mix" device. If yes, right-click the device and click on "Enable". This recording device will now record all your sounds that your system plays and provide it to whatever program is interested.
5. If you don't have a "Stereo Mix" device, you can install something similar using VB-Cable https://vb-audio.com/Cable/. After installing this software, you need to choose the playback device "CABLE Input" as your default.

II. Set up VLC to provide your system sounds in a stream

1. Start VLC and choose "Media"->"Stream"
2. Choose Tab "Capture Device", set "Capture Mode" to "DirectShow", set "Video Device Name" to "None" and set "Audio Device Name" to the audio capture device from Section I. Click on button "Stream"

1. In the "Source"-Screen, click Next
2. In "Destination Setup", select "HTTP" as New Destination and click "Add". In the next screen, port 8080 and path "/" are normally fine - this is what you need to specify in TinyVNC settings as well. Now click "Next"
3. In "Transcoding Options", check "Activate Transcoding", choose Profile "Audio - MP3" and click on the little wrench to the right of the dropdown box
4. In Tab "Encapsulation", choose "MP3". In Tab"Audio Codec", choose Codec "MP3" and a desired bitrate (96 should be ok, choose 64 or lower if you have isses with the bandwidth). Click on "Save", then "Next", then "Stream"
5. Now VLC will stream all audio coming from the above audio capture device (which is ideally set up to capture all your system sounds) via HTTP-server on port 8080, path "/" as MP3 to clients who are interested in hearing. You can test this by directing your browser to http://<servername>:8080/, where <servername> should be the IP address of the computer you're running VLC on.

Last but not least, you need to configure the port and path (8080 and "/" if you followed the instructions above) in TinyVNC server settings.

Voilà, you're done and should hear your systems audio when conneting to the VNC server!

Installation:

Install CIA with FBI 3DS, run 3dsx from homebrew launcher (put 3dsx file in /3ds/vice3DS-C64 dir) or run 3ds from flash card. Apart from this, a DSP-dump is required for sound to work correctly in the CIA version. https://gbatemp.net/threads/dsp1-a-new-dsp-dumper-cia-for-better-stability.469461/

Usage:

During first start, TinyVNC will write its config files to the SD card. You can customize the file /3ds/TinyVNC/keymap to customize button mappings. Preconfigured button mappings are:

• A: a-key
• B: b-key
• X: x-key
• Y: y-key
• L, R: q, w-keys
• ZL, ZR: 1, 2-keys
• C-Pad: Cursor up, down, left, right
• D-Pad: t, g, f, h-keys
• C-Stick: i, k, j, l-keys
• SELECT: Escape-key
• START: Disconnect

The touch screen acts as a touchpad for mouse control (tap-to-click, double-tap-to-double-click, tap-and-drag)

Release Notes

v1.0

• CIA/3DS version
• added streaming audio support (mp3 via HTTP)
• added on-screen keyboard
• configurable scaling (on/off)
• key value to toggle bottom backlight (8)

v0.9'

• Initial version

ToDos:

• UI to customize button mappings
• Configurable soft buttons on bottom screen
• Add support for 3DS Gyroscope / Accelerometer / 3D-slider (this is really difficult because no VNC server supports valuator inputs ...)

If anybody wants to help with these ToDos, you are welcome to help me with a pull request on github.

Have fun!