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Comment by cdnutter | Hacker News Reader

I’m curious why people have started using the 3DS as the gateway device for ports of games, like Melee and F-Zero X.

Don’t get me wrong, the 3DS is a gem of a console, and it harks back to when Nintendo put more thought into what they released instead of just another Mario sports game; but since the Switch is so much more powerful, I’d expect ports to that be more of a priority.

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Not sure why others are doing it, but the switch is kind of a boring console imo. You may as well just use one of the million PC handhelds with the same form factor, and persistent hacks require a hardware mod.

The 3DS is a fun pocketable form factor which a lot of people already own and easy to permanently mod on any firmware version or hardware revision.

I'm surprised no one has mentioned online: most people don't want to risk console bans, and that immediately makes jailbreaking their Switch a non-starter

At this point most people getting a 3DS are probably doing so specifically to jailbreak it

Most people use an EmuMMC to avoid bans. I think the bigger issue is that most Switch consoles need a hardmod.

From what I understand if you take certain precautions like not doing piracy, installing anything to the homescreen or cheating in multiplayer games you can use homebrew online without being banned, I've been used it occasionally and not been banned at least

The 3DS has the novelty of 3D. I always wanted to play F-Zero in this form factor and it seemed like a reasonable port to accomplish.

It seems to me that stereoscopic 3D is as much as "novelty" as is color. It's an objective improvement, because we perceive the real world in stereoscopic 3D. Of course the hardware implementation (not so much on the New 3DS) has various downsides, unlike color.

I don't think color is that different. E.g. older computers had limited color palettes, like 16 color EGA.

I'm saying that more colors are strictly better than fewer colors, not just a "gimmick", and that the same holds for stereoscopic 3D, modulo issues with implementing it in hardware via (auto)stereoscopic screens.

For example, if you play games on a virtual screen using a VR helmet, you pretty much always want the game to use stereoscopic 3D, because playing it without it would be strictly worse. (Okay, it would consume less GPU resources, which is good, but that would be the only difference, and this would also hold for things like lower resolution or frame rate.)

I would guess the 3DS is far more "jailbroken" than the switch.

It is. Any 3DS can be jailbroken with CFW with a simple Internet guide and no physical modifications. As far as I know, the Switch CFW is locked to only V1 motherboards or modchips, making it far less accessible even if it is more powerful.

Jailbroken 3DS scene is usually for modding the console OS itself given how easy it is to run custom firmware. And for ports, and emulation. While the GBA has a pretty dedicated community for custom games and romhacks, people often create games for the platform at gamejams because of how great the dev tooling is. It's a bit lackluster on the 3DS, but I did find the Love Brew[0] framework to be really nice. Even has simulator support[1] for testing your builds locally, though fonts will look much different on real hardware, with likely a bunch of other gotchas. Running out of RAM being a big one.

[0] https://lovebrew.org/

[1] https://github.com/lovebrew/nest

edit: compared it to the GBA homebrew scene since it's a large dedicated community to derive pros and cons between the two from. Switch is still receiving updates from Nintendo to brick your system.

The Switch is powerful enough it could just straight emulate an N64 game if it needed to. It has a huge back catalog of games where it does this. It's basically a computer on the level of a mobile phone or tablet, or a laptop from 15 years ago.

The 3DS is still a _console_, purpose built and limited in what it can do. It is also approachably easy to find a good one in working order, and still has the vibe of a retro console.

Also, for fun, I suspect.

The N64 dev scene seems to be taking off too. If I had to guess, working around limitations in hardware are the fun part for a lot of people.

I think there's currently a lot of nostalgia of the 3DS as the console people have grown up with. And the device has a good homebrew community around it, and is more interesting than something like the switch can definitely run it with enough horsepower

One non-obvious reason might be that it's the only handheld console with a natively 240p height screen. This means all the 2d ui elements will remain crisp at the same size as they would be on original hardware.

The PS Vita has a sweet 960x544 OLED

They mean because the game originally ran at 320x240 of N64, so no scaling of 2d assets is required

The 3DS has software jailbreaks, but the Switch requires a modchip to be soldered in.

I imagine that's a big part of it.

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