Homebrew Stupid question about moving from ds homebrew development to 3ds, where are the modes

[AnnoUnderdog]

I started with dabbling in Nintendo DS homebrew development using C years ago, tried to make a notepad application but never got far. I remember the DS worked with 4 layers (BG 0 to BG 3) and 7 video modes that dictate how they can be used. I think only the last mode offered a framebuffer. There was also a main and sub rendering engine, and I also remember you had to put spritesheets into specific areas in the VRAM.

Wanted to look into 3DS homebrew dev now just for fun, looked into Love Potion and thought to myself "wait, this looks too easy", and looking into several guides, I can't find any info on whether you still need to set up the video modes, or layers, or be aware of which VRAM bank to use. Are those gone? Has 3DS moved to a point where those are no longer needed? Cause it looks like now you just draw on the framebuffer and not worry about specific layers only allowing tiles and stuff. I'm just doing tests, drawing some tiles on the framebuffers of both the top and bottom screens, it seems more than capable so far.

It's also a little difficult getting info cause when I google, I keep getting search results regarding 3ds Max.

I also remember with the DS, you could offload some computations to the ARM7 processor (the one normally used for gba) to squeeze some better framerates, is there an equivalent to do such a thing in the 3DS?

 

[ghjfdtg]

Short: You use the GPU to do 2D/3D graphics using citro2d/citro3d.

Long:
There is no 2D hardware accelerator in pretty much any modern device including the 3DS. You do everything including 2D graphics with standard, OpenGL capable GPUs. No sprites, tiles or anything but textured triangles.