Pomelo - An Alternative 3DS Homemenu!

Hi Everyone, I am happy to share a project i was working on for the last couple of months called "Pomelo", which is an open-source alternative for the stock 3ds homemenu!

Why?

When i got my first 3ds console, a couple of months ago, i wanted to customize the homemenu UI of my console. I was quite surprised to see that the only customization mechanism was themes, and there was no alternative for the stock nintendo homemenu. I started learning about 3ds hacking and very quickly learned of a very supportive community that has TON of knowledge about anything 3ds related. Which made the entire experience a lot more fun :)

My goal with this project is to build an open source alternative to the stock nintendo homemenu, that would allow the community to customize and easily redesign. Currently Pomelo has a very limited set of features and changing the design requires writing C code :( I am hoping to implement a themes mechanism in the future, similar to the one nintendo has, but more flexible.

Features

Currently Pomelo is still in early development, with a lot of missing features and bugs. The features i focused on in the meantime are:

• Game Enumeration - Get a list of all the installed title
• Game Metadata - Show the name and icon of all the installed games
• Game Launching - Launch one of the games that are installed on your console. This feature is pretty buggy, a lot of games crash very quickly or even don't boot at all.

Design

As you can see in the screenshots below, i am still playing around with the design until i find something i like. Currently, my vibe is something retro, right now i'm trying to make it look like a NDS.

Plans for the future

First of all i want to focus on improving the Game Launching part, i understand this is one of the most important features of the 3ds homemenu. I want to get Pomelo to a state where users can actually use this as their daily driver. And then start with all the random QoL improvements.

Installation

Pomelo is using Luma3ds "Game Patching" to replace the stock nintendo homemenu, note that "Game Patching" is optional feature, that has to be enabled. Currently i only tested it on my console which is a New 3DS US. Currently the project is still in very early development, the source code is available for those who wish to run it on their own consoles.

For more details on installation, see the Github Repo

Feedback

I would love to hear your feedback and thoughts on this project, however, please note that this is a side project of mine and i am working on it in my spare time, so please be patient <3

Testing

Pomelo is using Luma3ds Game Patching to load itself, instead of the stock homemenu, incase something goes wrong, simply remove the Pomelo code.bin and exheader.bin files from the SDCard and the stock homemenu should boot as normal. However POMELO HAS NOT BEEN THOROUGHLY TESTED, USE AT YOUR OWN RISK.

Screenshots!

Pomelo running on real New 3DS hardware:

Pomelo running in Mikage emulator: