wuffleton:

Much to my dismay, my brand new Galaxy n3DS XL shipped with firmware version 11.0.0-33… Being the devious hacker that I am, this simply won’t do, and I took matters into my own hands (paws? whatever).

Since I’ve already done this to my original purple 3DS, I knew roughly the level of soldering hell I’d be in for. Actually, soldering was the easiest part of the whole process this time because the board for the n3DS XL is far easier to remove and the wires ended up being a LOT shorter. I had a harder time finding a good place to put a 4-pin dupont connector (my weapon of choice for connectivity here - easily concealed, secure, and overall a nice easy to crimp connector), and making sure all those satanic ribbon cables seated back in correctly without damaging them. I feel like Nintendo’s taking a page out of Apple’s book - I haven’t had this much “fun” with ribbon cables on the back of a logic board since I had to replace a screen in someone’s iPod Touch.

Overall, I’m really proud of this, I didn’t struggle anywhere near as much as I did with some of my past console mods, I’m actually getting pretty good at micro-soldering haha.

So here we are, less than 6 hours after I opened the box with my warranty void, my console modded, and my firmware delightfully downgraded. The best part is that my console looks totally stock externally cause nobody else is ever going to see it with the battery cover off during daily use.

Hacker mario voice: Ima in