Full speed emulation on your old 3DS and 2DS – GBA, SNES, MegaDrive, Genesis and more

The 3DS and 2DS are great handheld consoles with fantastic Homebrew potential via a simple software hack. If you’ve been following my channel you might have seen my 3DS homebrew setup videos. In these I showed you how to install Homebrew, how to get Nintendo DS games running at full speed and finally how to turn your console into a retro gaming handheld.

But the 3DS and 2DS came in two main variants; the old version and the new version. The new version has a more powerful processor and is therefore able to handle retro console emulation much better than the old version which I have here. So I was a bit disappointed with the gaming potential of my 3DS. I wanted to get full speed GameBoy Advance along with full speed 16 bit consoles such as the Nintendo SNES and Sega MegaDrive.

So in this video I’m going to show you how to achieve this.

TwiLight Menu

In my DS gaming video we used a Homebrew application called TwiLight Menu ++. This allowed us to use the built in DS compatibility that’s part pf the hardware in every 3DS and 2DS. This worked great and we were able to play basically any DS game you can find. But the 3DS and 2DS are also supposed to be hardware compatible with the GameBoy Advance. In my retro emulation video I installed the mGBA emulator which works great on new models but was unplayable on my old version. This is because mGBA is emulating the GameBoy Advance in software, not using the compatible hardware. So there had to be a way around this.

And TwiLight Menu is the answer!

Installing TWiLight Menu

I’ve covered the full installation of TWiLight Menu in my DS gaming video, but in brief you need to use the Universal Updater app we installed as part of the initial hack to download and install the TWiLight menu app for you. Just find it in the list of available titles and click to install it.

Once it’s installed, boot up the application and it will run a series of setup tasks before dropping you into the main launcher screen.

One thing I hadn’t really acknowledged at the time was that part of the installation process is to not only install the DS game launcher, but also GBARunner2 which allows you to launch GameBoy Advance titles as native games; exactly what we want.

On top of this it also installs a few very well optimised retro system emulators which will unlock the Nintendo and Sega 8 and 16 bit console ranges.

So make sure you follow along with the video to release the gaming potential of TWiLight Menu.