Taken from bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/simplyaj.com/post/3mtq6av6yp226

Plus a sidenote from this person on DS games: https://bsky.app/profile/simplyaj.com/post/3mttai4jaz22j

Not sure on the technical details of exactly how long they last, but I've heard similar things several times before.

Always depressing to be reminded of this. Haven't had many fail, but honestly haven't tried a lot of my 3DS/Vita games in a while, so who knows.

If nothing else tho, it's nice to have an excuse to revisit some things. Once you boot it up, you might find yourself enjoying the reminiscing. :)

Did not know this, thanks for the info 👍 @emb@lemmy.world

Don't be too depressed, emulation is always an option 🤓

Nintendo wants to:
Know your location.

Allow / Block? _

Not always. Certain 3DS games require either lot of horse power and some don't play well without touch screen or a second screen. I also recommend to get another 3DS and hack it, and dump all your games as Roms to play on the hacked machine without emulation. So that way you preserved your own save files and games at least for yourself, in case they say "bye bye" to you. Otherwise, yes, emulation is your friend. :-) (Me a big emulation fan, BTW.)

I hacked my kids 2DS recently and now I just play it for fun :/

Seriously though, keep it alive as the the DS consoles are still awesome.

By the way, if you find that one of your 3DS cartridges has become corrupted there's still a chance to save it. There's a homebrew application that can check for corruption and potentially fix the cartridge.

If you haven't already installed custom firmware on your 3DS yet, then make sure you follow this guide and no other. Never follow a video guide as they are often outdated and may contain unsafe methods of hacking the system.

It's legal if you own the game.

Nintendo could not physically give less of a shit what is legal and not, they slap people with lawyers and then win even when they don't have a case. They don't need a case, they have money.

You and I might care about things like that but Nintendon't.

Your CD/DVD-based games will disintegrate, too, without you being able to stop the disc rot.

3ds is so easy to hack. You'd be better off Homebrewing + hShop in the long run.

This is why I recommend backing up all games. Suck for physical switch games, since soft modding anything older than the first model of switch is impossible (for now)

My Smash Bros 3DS cartridge corrupted.

Thankfully 3DSes are trivial to homebrew and games are easily acquired through alternative digital means. I was able to extract my save data and transfer it to a digital copy.

Honestly, with the fact the 3DS servers are gone, don't even bother with a second one, just hack your main one.

There are 3rd party game servers still running, which means you can go back to playing games online, especially with a hacked 3DS.

There are even tools to transfer files to/from your computer wirelessly, which is great for not needing to shuffle SD cards constantly.

Yes, they do. Why do you think they haven't gone after Dolphin?

The reason they were able to go after the two switch emulators is because the creators were profiting from them.

Why does Dolphin still exist, then?

And very important for buying used. A sealed game might be a dead game by now.

They hunt down emulators of their current console (Switch at the moment) as they believe it hurts their bottom line. They don't give a damn about Wii or 3DS emulators

Hope my psp games don’t get disc rot.

For not playing well without the touch screen, there's modern SBC clones like the Anbernic RG DS. Don't know how good they are but they exist.

They don't necessarily bother with older stuff. The focus is to (unethically) mess with the stuff that is currently hurting their bottom line, which is why retro only occasionally gets shafted when they repack a 20 year old game, unadapted in an emulator, for twenty bucks. Although, rom hacks also get routinely fucked for whatever reason. That stuff can't even be making any monetary difference, so I'm assuming they just choose to be dipshits as a goal in itself.

The profit stuff is genuinely shady but they sure aren't just going for those. They've DMCA'd rom hacks and stuff that just weren't doing anything like that

They give enough of a damn to prevent Steam from offering Dolphin on their storefront:
https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2023/07/20/what-happened-to-dolphin-on-steam/

This kinda stuff is exactly why I finally sold my four-decade collection for $20k and just play everything on emulator with filters now.

No, they hunt down the ones making a profit, because otherwise they have no legal standing.

Ok, so why do Eden and Citron still exist?

They were able to go after Yuzu because Yuzu profited from their emulator.

Its super easy to jailbreak a 3DS though.

It is. I did that last year (or was it this year actually?) on my 2DS. It is easy if you follow all steps exactly. But I wouldn't call it "super easy", at least not recommending it doing for everyone. Because it is very intimidating to someone who is not technically versed.

Also check on your batteries. If you’re better off now than when you got your 3ds (which I hope you are) it might be a good time to refresh all your similar devices’ batteries before shit gets even more expensive.

Technically Yuzu was, allegedly, using something proprietary to run properly. I think the same is true of Ryujinx, although not sure. Now I'm not sure if it's true, given they settled out of court, and honestly we do know the REAL reason is the bottom line but legally they can't use that argument. Ironically I don't think it's even illegal to profit off an emulator, lol.

That said, emulators are legal in the same way a bong is legal while weed might not be. It's technically illegal to use roms/isos you yourself didn't rip, even if you have the cartridge or disk (and thus, license) of that game because it's not a copy of your cartridge or disk, but it'd be pretty annoying to prove you didn't rip it yourself as you'd probably need to go into the code to see if there's a unique identifier. I'm not sure if that's ever been tested in court, though I wouldn't want to try it.

It's probably too late for me, but I don't think I care about saves older than 10 years. I can't even remember what I was doing in a game a week later, let alone a decade.

Does it permanently bork any new saves, though? I know my SNES Z:LttP had permanent save issues but I think that's a different story.

I think it's that the actual game itself gets corrupted. So it's not even that you can't save, it's that you can't play the game.

Like @ClipperDefiance@piefed.social pointed out in this thread tho, there may be ways to save a corrupted game.

I wonder if they ever got A Link Between Worlds working. I played that on my 3DS and wanted to emulate it for higher resolution but, like you said, it ran like doodoo compared to other 3DS games.

Your LttP cart, assuming you already changed the battery, could have a bad SRAM chip. You can FRAM mod the cartridge to both save it and remove the requirement for a battery at the same time.

Also worth checking all the traces from the cart connector to the SRAM chip.

RG DS doesn't have enough horsepower for 3DS. Some select titles work but stock Android eats up any overhead it might've had.

The Ayn Thor can do more 3DS (and Wii U).

I'll keep that in mind. Quite a few of the games need a battery change but I think you're right about LttP. I emulate though so it's not as essential as it used to be, it'll be more relevant when I want to share the old ways with my kids when they're a little older.

Is this also true for USB thumb drives and other flash memory media? Cuz uh... I might have to plug some shit in so it doesn't break. Nearly all my thumbdrives are over or approaching 10 years old.

USB/Flash memory is not an archival storage medium. It is far to volatile, so as long as you are not using USB sticks as an long term archive for precious, irreplaceable documents/data, it shouldnt be a big deal to you.

Flash memory will self-erase if left idle/unplugged for a long enough time.

Mechanical hard drives can be archival, but you cant just load them up with data and shove them in a closet.. They need to be hooked back up and spun up every month or so, to keep lube moved around and keep platters and arms freely movable.

I don't mean data already stored on them, I mean their ability to still have data written to them in the first place. There's really only two things I use them for: Moving print files to my 3D printer (no networking, and direct USB connection is wonky af), or to reinstall an OS. So they don't get regular use and thus don't see regular electricity running through 'em.

This plus batteries are what has me thinking about selling my handheld collections. I have them all out so I can periodically keep them charged. I left my first switch uncharged for 6 months and the battery crapped out so I had to open it up and change it out.

Short answer: It depends. Doing full flash reads of your USB sticks and SD cards (dd if=/dev/XXX of=/dev/null bs=4k status=progress) may help for a lot of them. But not all. The only solution I can actually recommend (for any storage media) is backup them up and regularly testing/moving the backups.

If the read of the disk is particularly slow then that indicates the flash cells are degraded. If a second read of the disk is much faster then that indicates some action may have been taken by the flash controller IC to fix this.

Long answer:

NAND flash cells slowly leak charge, making their state indistinguishable. A flash controller IC (usually separate to the NAND flash IC or ICs) has the job of noticing and fixing this (by rewriting the data to another or the same cell) before it gets too bad. That doesn't necessarily mean it does it particularly well.

Some (few?) flash controllers periodically scan for weak cells and rewrite to fix them. Some (most?) flash controllers notice weak cells only when you read them. Some (many?) flash controllers are shit and don't do any of this.

Flash controllers also have a bunch of other features and jobs, like maintaining a spare pool of cells (over-provisioning) to swap out for bad ones and even forcing the USB stick into read-only mode if they think things have gone particularly bad. Again this varies a lot depending on implem, some do it, some don't, and for different reasons (out of over-provis cells, corrupt mapping metadata, arbitrary thresholds, etc).

thats a big i'unno. depends on the chips, the controllers, the usage of the drive, etc.

personally, usb sticks are basically a commodity consumable (especially if you get them at the sweetheart size) and i don't consider it wasteful to replace them after 3-5 years if you are doing anything remotely important with them.

but if you just have them for transfering files from one PC to another in your own house, where a loss won't be catastrophic, just a mild perturberance, then use it till it physically doesnt work anymore

Bookmarked for later, going to load up all my old games tomorrow.

You are correct.

i have a bunch of 3DS carts i've barely used in almost a decade..

does anyone know a good way to dump all those carts and their save data so they can be used on emulators? have a 2DS XL but it isn't CFWed yet

haha the Switch isn't 10 years old silly! it only came out a few years ago didn't it

There is a video from Linus tech tipe on how to get data off the cartridges and digitalise them onto your pc

This neighbour comment might be for you.

Yeah, I tried booting an emulator handheld I've been gifted a year ago and pretty much hadn't played since then, and the battery didn't hold more than a minute of charge. Moreover, while googling for replacement batteries, I came upon an article saying this and some other devices have screws positioned such that the heads pierce the battery if it ever starts swelling.

More work yay