Zac Builds is back with a brand new Nintendo mod and this time he’s built a “new” New Nintendo 3DS. The console was a much-needed upgrade of the original Nintendo 3DS (even if the names of all the other versions were a bit confusing).
Zac went to town on this one, adding two batteries in parallel, Bluetooth headphone connectivity, USB-C and wireless charging, and he even made a dock for it. There was of course some 3D printing involved to allow for the new components to fit and give better ergonomic support but the final product was impressive.
That said, this mod and so many that I’ve seen in a post-3DS/soon-to-be-Switch 2 era have felt more like building your own console with Nintendo parts. A lot of the improvements were based on 2025 thinking and I’m sure most people were happy with what they got at the time so adding all these new bits when you could get them all in a handheld emulator is an engineering showcase. Which is cool, don’t get me wrong, but… eh. I guess it’s “YouTube ‘fixes’ old thing” video fatigue and it’s really just a personal mod so who cares what anyone else thinks.1
- Quite a few commenters had critiques on the build itself from an engineering perspective which are objectively valid ↩︎
