The developers of Citra, a 3DS emulator, have managed to boot up a commercial game for the first time on any 3DS emulator. The game that was successfully booted up was The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3DS.
While ROMs have always gave people the opportunity to play games they never played before or play games that they loss or burned out, the game may have been emulated but that doesn’t mean that it’s playable. The 3DS was launched back in 2011, and it’s still somewhat new. So it may take a while before we have an up and running emulator with working ROMs.
So until further notice, make sure to have caution when you see 3DS emulators and ROMs floating around, there are a lot of scams and viruses surrounding these so called ’emulators.’