Folium 4+

Unfortunately, this leaves a lot to be desired. The games at least run (and on DS games they even work at full speed without configuration, imagine that.) but there’s a little bit too much fiddling that has to be done out of the box to get 3DS titles running at an acceptable frame rate and without hideous distortion on the screens by default. The new update has simultaneously made this situation better and worse, now CRASHING 3DS games by default because the developer forgot to disable a JIT-related shader feature, but you can now get SOME games (not all - one game I really want to play just will not) running at full speed by lowering the CPU clock speed. Other than that, Folium’s UI and options are even more basic than Delta, not even allowing you to quit games without closing the app (even though the button to do so is now available, it’s disabled for no reason). Look, I get it - Apple’s JIT policies make it impossible to let an emulator like Folium run at its absolute best, and I’m lucky to be able to use my iPhone 13 Pro to run any of these demanding titles at all, never mind at full speed. Still, at $4.99 with ho-hum performance unless you have the latest, top of the line iPhone, I feel like people will get more out of Delta than Folium, even without the game-changing 3DS support.

Folium still clearly has many patches to go through. There are some games on here that literally CAN NOT BE PLAYED. Like the Mario & Luigi games for 3ds. Sometimes when you play them you’ll be in the middle of a cutscene and then it just kick you out of the app. Like Mario & Luigi: Paper Jam for example, you literally CAN’T PLAY THE GAME because when you get to the cutscene with Paper Peach, the game KICKS YOU OUT! Then there are games like Rayman Origins which I think will never be fixed because this app has gone through several updates and Rayman Origins has stayed EXACTLY THE SAME! And there is a feature where you can upload .cia files to folium. However, I have uploaded 2 of these files to folium and they can not be played either! One just shows me a blank screen and the other says;

“ ********* PANIC *********
I_Error !
Shutting down in 10 seconds . . . “

Did I mention that the files can’t be deleted once they’re uploaded? WHY WOULD YOU HAVE AN ADD .cia FILE FEATURE IF THE FILES DON’T WORK? I haven’t even tried the GBA and NDS emulators yet and I don’t need to. Delta and Retroarch probably do it much better! In conclusion, if you’re desperate to play 3DS games on your phone like me then I guess you could buy this emulator. But if you have a Mac or Windows computer then don’t waste your time. Just get altstore or something. Currently, this app is a solid “Better than nothing” out of 5

I had been enjoying folium for the past week or so and had managed to get tomodachi life to run smoothly only stuttering when it needed to generate the voice-lines. A recent update overnight had moved the game from playable to unplayable. The skin feature does not allow you to scale the on screen controls which adds a ton of clutter and makes playing it if it would run smoothly still just as clunky and frustrating. Which I could grin and bare until they changed it again.

Normally I do not leave reviews but in event someone from the team sees this I hope they’re able to fix it swiftly so I can enjoy playing my childhood Tomodachi life save.

At the current state the comfortable yet still stuttering (not a fault of the team) gameplay I was able to enjoy thanks to folium was currently bricked as of this morning I’m writing this.

As of today I’m no longer able to use folium to enjoy 3DS emulation whilst the update brought a better control layout it takes up way too much real estate and may be partially responsible for the performance going from tolerable to soft locking me from playing tomodachi life.

I hope the folium team is able to rectify this in time up until this update I really enjoyed my time on the emulator but was rudely awakened by a new larger clunkier UI. And my favorite game no longer running well.