A 2DS XL in 2024?
We had 3DS XLs pretty much since they were released. Hers was red, mine was blue. They both got years of use. When the 2DS XL was released in July of ’17 we were both adamant that we weren’t going to get them because our old 3DSs were still working perfectly fine.
Shortly after making that decision we picked up a pair of 2DSs. Hers was orange and white, mine was blue and black. We played some Mario Kart and some Animal Crossing and then stashed them in a drawer for the next 7 years as we focused on the new hotness, which at that time of course was the Switch.
A couple of months ago I was cleaning out the downstairs closet and came upon all the the 3/2DSs and started doing some research. I’d known that the 3DS store and servers had all recently been shut down, but I also knew that the system had a somewhat active modding community behind it.
Therein laid the rabbit hole…
I’ve recently been getting into handheld retro gaming on small emulator devices such as the Miyoo Mini+ and the Anbernic RG35xxSP, which I’ve written about here before. I primarily found myself exploring the massive Game Boy Advance catalog along with some dabbling in the Super Nintendo era. I’d seen some devices that could do 3DS emulation, which included my Steam Deck, but I didn’t feel like having some variation of two screens shown on a single screen device captured the same experience as the original clamshell.
So there I was, holding a 2DS XL which was practically new and I started to learn about soft modding, custom firmware, and all of the things that could be done with this little device that Nintendo had recently decided to abandon. I found out that it can run GBA games natively. Natively as in not emulated, due to GBA hardware being built into the device. Super Nintendo emulation is also built in and both systems, as well as a few others, can be injected by way of the system’s Virtual Console integration so the games show up on your main library screen and run seamlessly. There are even Virtual Boy emulators available via Homebrew options!
So now I have a small clamshell device that can run all Nintendo games up to and including the 3DS generation in the “proper” form factor with a 4.8 inch screen for Game Boy and Game Boy Advance games and roughly 5 hours of battery life. There are no ads, no half finished “Early Access” games, and it’s not trying to sell me anything. It just full of great games to play with no distractions, and has quickly become my default handheld system and it travels with me everywhere, and I am pretty stoked to play all of the Fire Emblems again.
Until the next obsession…