Piracy hit the Nintendo DS pretty hard. Thanks to the R4 flash cart and the wave of others that followed, it’s actually ridiculously easy to run pirated games on Nintendo’s dual-screened handheld. Those same flashcarts can actually run on Nintendo’s new 3DS – but only for playing illicitly backed-up copies of DS games.
That could change, if there’s any truth to claims by a group called "Crown3DS,” who say they’ve made headway in running 3DS roms.
As it stands right now the device is far too big for any sort of distribution, and is capable of only running Splinter Cell 3DS. I’m calling shenanigans – and I hope I’m right; none of the regular culprits involved in the DS hacking scene have made any breakthroughs with running 3DS games – a result of an extra layer of security Nintendo added in to combat the “heyday of piracy” that plagued the DS. Don’t get me wrong – I don’t believe that flashcarts like the R4 are inherently evil; although they do allow for piracy, they also allow for homebrewed applications to be run, extending the device’s feature set and utility.
This 3DS hack, if it’s real and works isn’t like that though; it boots games directly without any sort of UI – meaning it’s for piracy only, and rightly shouldn’t exist. Sure, pirates would justify it (as they always do) by saying stuff like “The 3DS shouldn’t have had region locking.” The DS had no region locks…why’d you pirate those games then? Here’s the video of the hack; make up your own mind if it’s real or not.
Last Updated: October 3, 2011
