CTRComposer

What it is

A C plugin that draws its own UI straight to the framebuffer.

It runs inside the game's process, so writing memory is just a pointer, and it renders everything itself — window, system font, menus, tools. That makes a plugin self-contained and portable across games and across Luma3DS versions: there are no hook-wrapper addresses or per-game assumptions to line up.

About 90% of the code is game-independent. A new plugin is essentially a cheat table + art + Title ID. This repository is the blank half: the whole engine, with the game removed.

It ships with zero game art and zero game addresses. The example cheats are inert — they write nothing until you set EXAMPLE_ENABLED to 1 and fill in real addresses. The button glyphs are original, generated from primitives by a script in the repo.

Two builds. Which one do you want?

Same engine, from the same source tree. The difference is who is holding it.

🔧 For developers

CTRComposer-BlankTemplate.3gx

Build a plugin for one game.

You edit C, and in exchange you get the whole engine free: folder menus, live themes, on-screen keypad, inline button glyphs, SD persistence, localization, a favourites quick menu, a guide reader, a progress tracker, and the four memory tools.

What you add is the part no engine can give you — your game's addresses. Everything else is already written.

Pick this if you want a cheat menu for a specific game, you're reviving an old .plg that no longer loads, or you want an overlay UI for a homebrew idea of your own.

Installs to luma/plugins/<TitleID>/

🔎 For players & explorers

default.3gx

Memory tools in every game. No code.

Drop one file on the SD card and every title on the system gains Cheat Search, a RAM Dumper and a Hex Editor on SELECT. Nothing to compile, nothing to configure, no Title ID to look up.

It carries no cheats — that is a fact about reality, not a missing feature. A cheat is a memory address, and an address belongs to one game and one region. The tooling is what's genuinely universal, so the tooling is what it carries.

Pick this if you want to poke at any game without writing code, you're hunting addresses before deciding to build a plugin, or you just want a permanent hex editor on the console.

Installs to luma/plugins/default.3gx — the root, not a game folder.

They compose, and a per-game plugin always wins. Luma only falls back to default.3gx for titles with no folder of their own, so your own plugin runs where you built one and the toolkit covers everything else. The natural workflow is exactly that order: hunt addresses anywhere with the toolkit, then build the real plugin from the template once you have them.

Running on hardware

Real captures of this template. The game behind the window is just whatever title it was loaded into — none of its data is used.

Example cheats list — **Example cheats.** Toggles get a checkbox, one-shot actions get a plain box — the menu never shows an off checkbox next to something with no state.

Value picker with a live preview — **Value picker.** For cheats where a toggle makes no sense: pick from a list and it writes that value, with a live preview of what is there now.

Cheat Search tool — **Cheat Search.** Known and unknown value, scan types, memory-region filter, one-step undo, and poke.

Hex editor and on-screen keypad — **Hex Editor** and the code-drawn keypad. A–F grey out in DEC mode; read-only memory is refused rather than crashed.

Progress tracker — **Tracker.** Per-item progress that syncs from memory — it clears stale auto-marks too, so it reflects the current save, not a tally.

Tracker item detail — **Tracker detail.** Each entry carries its own status, a hint, and an optional location you reveal with `X` — so a guide can stay spoiler-free.

**Guide reader.** Word-wrap, categories and resume. Pages come from C or from a text file on the SD card.

Settings menu — **Settings.** Theme, language, toasts and rebindable in-game hotkeys, all persisted next to the `.3gx`.

About screen — **About.** Text only — no logo image, so there is nothing third-party to inherit.

What you get for free

All optional, all yours to configure or delete.

Folder menu primitive — one row-draw call; list, grid or anything else is your layout choice.
Live theme switching with auto-contrast, so text stays readable on light and dark themes alike.
Inline button glyphs — write {A} in any string and the real console icon renders, in both font sizes, and it survives translation.
Cheat Search, RAM Dumper, Hex Editor, About.
Progress tracker that syncs from memory instead of counting.
Guide reader with word-wrap, resume, and SD-loadable pages.
Localization — T("English") with graceful fallback; partial translations just show English.
Quick menu of favourites — cheats, folders and tools — on a rebindable combo.
On-screen keypad with touch, DEC/HEX toggle, and art fully separate from input handling.
SD persistence that migrates rather than discards, so a version bump doesn't reset everyone.
Auto-repeat, toasts, and SELECT to resume the game from anywhere.
No Title ID to hard-code — the plugin finds its own folder from the loader at runtime.

Install

One .3gx per plugin folder, named for your game's Title ID.

sd:/luma/plugins/<TitleID>/CTRComposer-BlankTemplate.3gx

Enable the plugin loader in Rosalina (L + ↓ + Select → Plugin Loader), launch the game, then press SELECT. Keep the 3D slider at zero: the overlay renders to one framebuffer pair, so stereoscopic 3D will ghost it.

Build

devkitARM + 3gxtool. Build from a path with no spaces — the toolchain breaks on them.

git clone https://github.com/samaBR85/CTRComposer.git
cd CTRComposer
make