A hacked Nintendo 3DS is better than any gaming handheld

I’m a big gamer, and I always have been. One of my favorite consoles of all time is the Nintendo 3DS, thanks to its great OS and its backward compatibility with the excellent catalog of Nintendo DS games. The system got better with time as well, thanks to the work the community put into modding it and developing an incredible modding scene. While the device is officially end of life with all of its wireless services shut, I’d argue that the Nintendo 3DS is still a better system today than pretty much all of the gaming handhelds out there.

The Nintendo 3DS managed to exceed expectations

It started off poorly

When the 3DS released, it was coming off the back of one of the most successful consoles of all time: the Nintendo DS. Its gimmick was its glasses-free 3D feature, but that nearly backfired. With health concerns surrounding the console that warned children under the age of six shouldn’t even use it (cutting out a pretty big demographic for Nintendo) alongside a rather high price tag, it struggled to get off the ground in its first year. However, the company dropped the price of the handheld, focused on bringing more (and better) games to the platform, and released the Nintendo 3DS XL, too.

As time went on, more and more took interest in the 3DS, and not just would-be gamers, either. Device hackers took a special interest in it, with a combination of piracy-focused teams looking to make a profit and enthusiasts looking to share their knowledge dominating the scene for much of the lifespan of the 3DS. As time went on, those piracy teams (such as Gateway) lost out, and developers like smealum, SciresM, and yellows8 all built up the scene in a way that made it very difficult for those looking to enable piracy to make money off of it.

Because of Nintendo’s efforts to fight piracy too, the 3DS managed to do significantly better than its predecessor in that department. While it eventually succumbed to the onslaught of attempts to break the system open, it was never as bad as the DS’ rampant piracy that was enabled by simple (not to mention cheap) flashcards that you could buy online for less than $10 in some instances.

Why the 3DS is better than a gaming handheld

Compact gaming is unbeaten

One of the best things about the Nintendo 3DS is just how compact it is. Even the XL 3DS is still quite slim and easy to carry, and its foldable nature also protects it from things in your bag or pockets without needing to be in a case. It’s a very powerful system for how compact it is, and things get even better thanks to the software modifications that you can make to it.

As an example, you can back up your 3DS cartridges for later installation onto your 3DS, and you can even back up your DS games and play them using TWiLight Menu++ from your SD card. On top of that, remember when Nintendo shut down game servers so that you couldn’t play titles like Animal Crossing: New Leaf and Mario Kart 7 online anymore? Using Pretendo, you can go back online with Mario Kart and other games, and Animal Crossing support is just around the corner, according to the developers.

If you think all of that sounds great, there’s still a lot more, too. Thanks to the development community, retro gamers are everywhere for the Nintendo 3DS. You can play DS games and GBA games natively, but you can also emulate NES, SNES, PlayStation 1 (on the new 3DS), and older consoles, too.

As an example, Nintendo had a Virtual Console system where games from past consoles were available for purchase, and community members discovered how to modify those install files to inject their own games, which you can do with a tool called NSUI. With this tool, I was able to install Pokemon Emerald on my 3DS as a Virtual Console title, despite that never being an official Virtual Console title for the 3DS. Plus, LayeredFS, built into most custom firmware, enables ROM hacks just by dragging and dropping files to your SD card.

To sum everything up: with a hacked Nintendo 3DS, you can play a huge library of fantastic games natively from three generations of handheld: 3DS, DS, and Game Boy Advance. On top of that, you can then play a ton of retro titles from past consoles that you can install on your home screen, alongside your other games, which will also run as if they were native titles. And yet, it still gets even better.

Because of the incredible amount of interest in the Nintendo 3DS, there is so much homebrew out there that you can install. There are save editors that you can install for Animal Crossing or Pokemon, there’s NetPass for StreetPassing online, Red Viper for emulating Virtual Boy games, and there’s even an Among Us port that someone made that you can install and play online. It’s a fun community with a lot of talented developers, and it’s super easy to mod your 3DS if you want to get in on the action and you have one lying around.

How to mod your Nintendo 3DS

You should be convinced by now

If you want to hack your 3DS, or you did in the past and want to get up to date on the latest methods, there’s an easy-to-follow community-made guide that’s constantly updated. It will help you through the entire process, and even update you to newer methods if you hacked your 3DS in the past with an old method.

The entire process can take less than half an hour, and it’s a ridiculously easy process to follow. All you need is an SD card and some time. The most recent method at the time of writing for hacking a new Nintendo 3DS on the latest firmware is via navigating to a link in your web browser.

Hacking my 3DS was one of the best ways to breathe new life into it, and it had me taking it out of a drawer and using it for the first time in years.