A couple of days ago, I decided to pick back up my Nintendo 3DS. Well, it’s actually my little brother’s 3DS. My mom gifted it to him when he was like 8 or 9. So that must have been more than 10 years ago by this point. Crazy how time flies.

He is off to college now, so I borrowed his 3DS permanently and made it mine. First thing I did many many years ago when the 3DS was still relatively new was to install a Custom Firmware, and I made many copies of his SD memory in case something went wrong. We played many (legitimate copies of) games like Pokémon X and Y, Mario Kart 3DS of which I attached an image of, and Super Mario 3D land.

A couple of weeks ago I remember that my girlfriend was asking me to play some Super Mario on the DS. She grew up playing with the Nintendo DS Lite, so she played a lot of old DS games. I said well, this is probably the right time to revive my 3DS. I found the charger I bought a couple years ago and charged it. It works flawlessly, I feel like it is almost criminal that I don’t use the console more often. I gave her the 3DS with New Super Mario Bros 2, which she was quick to point out is not the same as what she grew up with… but she still liked it and gave me a thank you hug.

She played with the console for a while, but I noticed the battery was running out way faster than I remember. It was no mystery since that was the original battery, and the console is over 10 years old, lithium can only last for so long.

I decided to get a new battery. This was surprisingly simple and hard at the same time. There are many Chinese batteries out there that would be happy to have a chance to be your new battery. At the same time, the quality of those batteries I’ve found over the years is not amazing. I suppose I should also talk about that time I worked with my uncle at his electronics repair shop, but we will leave it for another time. Nintendo used to sell the original 3DS batteries on their website, but that is no longer the case, or at least it was not the case a couple of weeks ago when I was trying to get them. After a lot of “what is the best 3DS after market battery Reddit” on Google. I decided to go with this one:

So far, the battery has been good. we would have to see how it lasts overtime.

Funny enough, a couple of weeks ago I bought my girlfriend a Nintendo Switch, so she does not touch the 3DS anymore. Coincidentally, I also started actively trying to learn Japanese again, I will make another post talking about this in more detail, because the Japanese language and I have a lot of history. So I said. Well, I might use it myself now, so a lot of 妖怪ウォッチ (Yo-kai Watch) and どうぶつの森 (Animal Crossing) has been played in the last couple of days.

That brings me to the title of this post. PRESERVE YOUR ELECTRONICS. In this day and age where nothing is yours, the software you buy is only a temporary license, and the new consoles seem to be following more anti-consumer practices see this Nintendo announcement about game licenses, having old hardware that can still run amazing titles, old computers that can serve as a server, old phones that can be use to connect to bluetooth OBD2 readers. All of those things are as useful as they were back in their days, if not even more. Consider not throwing those old electronics away, you might have some gold in your hand that you are just not seeing the shine, you just need to wipe the dust away.