With Nintendo's recent closure of the 3DS eShop, twitter threads everywhere are inundated with threads about the ease and satisfaction of modding your 3DS. As is tradition, I swiftly added the project to my to-do list (and backburnered it until the last possible moment). Thankfully, if you've got about an hour of time and are able to follow directions, there are a variety of very comprehensive and amazing guides out there, most notably, this aptly named one at 3ds.hacks.guide.
I decided to breathe new life into my long forgotten console over the weekend, and the experience was both easy and highly rewarding.
Why mod your 3ds?
Honestly, the biggest questions in my mind about modding a 3DS ultimately amounted to "yeah, but why?" The thing that got the ball rolling was actually that I was itching for a modding project and this seemed a great way to spend a Friday night. After I enabled the custom firmware and completed the project, it revealed some pretty amazing reasons that left me wondering, "why didn't I do this earlier?"
Dumping your DS/3DS games
Ripping and dumping roms to the mounted SD card is possible using Godmode9, which is wonderful for emulation and game preservation reasons. It's capable of ripping both 3DS and DS titles at a variety of encryption levels (which matters for emulation). I've already started work on preserving my DS library and am excited to move on to my 3DS library.
Custom themes (!!!!)
As an aesthetically minded nerd, having a customized theme complete with icons, background music, and sound effects is worth the modding experience alone. ThemePlaza has over 1,400 pages of custom themes created by users and has a supportive community available to those who want help in creating their own. Installing themes with Anemone3ds can be as simple as scanning a desired QR code (make sure to set a default theme first in the main menu of the 3DS). There are also features baked in to disable background music or even create a shuffle queue that will display a different theme each time the console is powered on.
Emulating other console games
Emulating DS roms on a machine without touch screen capabilities can be a mixed bag. Clicking for touch is dodgy, and using the microphone often doesn't work. (SO many early DS titles annoyingly utilized the microphone for the most arbitrary things!) Therefore, emulating any DS roms on 3DS hardware naturally works the best in this case. More notably, custom apps such as TWiLight Menu++ allow emulation of a variety of roms, including NES, SNES, GBA, and many more. Using apps like New Super Ultimate Injector also allows for the creation of shortcuts to the roms themselves to be launched from the home screen if desired.
It's easy and fun
If you've been itching for a techy project that won't eat up a ton of your time, I'd highly recommend taking this on. All in all, it only took me around an hour and a half to complete and the benefits were instantly visible. The guide's I've referenced here are very comprehensive and, dare I say, idiot-proof. Some of them even go as far as explaining how to copy and paste files (yes really). So get out there and mod your 3DS. Mod your grandma's 3DS. Teach your grandma to mod her 3DS. Whatever your route, happy modding!