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How To Play NES Games On Your Nintendo 3DS XL

Your Nintendo 3DS and 3DS XL console is actually a very powerful hand held game system.  Gone are the day of the Gameboy itself, where it was great at playing games made for it, but it's built in processor would never have been able to play games made for other console systems.  The 3DS packs a powerful processor and a gorgeous screen that enables you to load and play games from a handful of classic console systems.  Here, we'll cover how you can play your NES games on your Nintendo 3DS system, using all freeware emulators and an R4 3DS card, which will enable you to load the emulator and use it on your Nintendo 3DS console.

For the sake of this tutorial, we are going to assume that you have your R4 3DS firmware on your card and you are all set up and ready to load and play any type of game, 

nesdsmedia or emulator files.  If you haven't yet setup your R4 with the firmware, please visit our r4 ads setup page for step by step instructions on how to do so.

You'll first need to download the latest version of nesDS for the Nintendo 3DS, from the official site at: http://sourceforge.net/projects/nesds/  for you to be able to start setting it up on your micro SD card.

Once you have downloaded new DS, you'll have a .rar archive.  This compressed archive is what contains all of the files you need to start playing all of your NES games.  You can easily download WinRar or 7-Zip depending on whether you are running Windows or Mac OSX on your computer.  Both of them have free versions which will work just fine for the purposes of this tutorial.

Once you have the file downloaded, you're looking for just one file in the archive.  It's called nesds.nds   The .nds format stands for the Nintendo DS format which also work on the Nintendo 3DS console.

 The nesds.nds file is all you need to get the emulator running on your Nintendo 3DS.   Copy this file over to the micro SD card that you are using in your R4 3DS Card.  You can put this file in to the root folder of the micro SD card itself.  The R4 is very good with menus and folders, so you will then be able to quickly navigate to this file in the root of your micro SD card.

We always tell customers that they should create a special folder for the NES games or games for other emulators (we'll cover other emulators in another post).  This is not a requirement, but we recommend is because it is certainly a whole lot easier to find the game or games you want to play when you have them all in a folder and ready tog go.  The easiest thing to do is create folder on your MicroSD Card labelled NES, and put all of your NES games and apps right in to that folder. This way, when you have loaded NES DS on your Nintendo 3DS system, you'll know that you have to navigate to the nesDS folder in order to be able to load your games.

Now you simply have to put your micro SD card in to your R4 3DS card and plug that in to your Nintendo 3DS or 3DS XL console.  Power it up, and you will see the R4 as an option, which you can select and you will see nesDS as one of the options to load (it is treated like any other game or application).  Once you loadit up, you will see the nesDS menu, and be able to pick and choose the games you want to play.  Select the game you want, and play away.  It's an amazing way to go back in time and play some of the very best games every made.  Not to mention you have your 8-bit retro game fix to boot :)