 This is a Nintendo 3DS or rather This is yeah, you heard me the partner CTR is a beast unlike anything we've ever seen before It's a 3DS development and capture kit that was manufactured by Kyoto microcomputer company for Nintendo and Like other console dev kits it boasts features that are absent from its retail kin like the ability to remotely debug software and it also has extra memory and special controls But what sets this one apart from the development kits? We've looked at before is that it adds back a feature that nearly Every console has had in some manner since the invention of video games the ability to connect to a TV of course Connecting a TV wasn't enough for the 3DS. So what about seconds TV? This thing is absolutely wild this DS that I'm holding in my hand This is just a dummy controller all the brains are actually in here You can fit so much brains in here Oh and so much segue to our sponsor You green you greens 100 watt power strip includes three AC outlets three USB C ports and a USB a port for maximum Compatibility you can easily charge your iPhone 13 to 60% in just 30 minutes learn more at the link down below Since we began covering older console dev kits We've been inundated with emails from people wanting to send us their precious Retro relics to have them featured and when Twitter user swimmin got in touch His offering really stood out from the crowd of all the best-selling consoles out there Only the Nintendo 3DS lacks a way to output to a television Super Nintendo and Gamecube both had ways to play games from the Gameboy family PlayStation portable had models with direct TV out and the PlayStation TV was essentially just a Non-portable PS Vita even the DS light had a built-in method for getting composite video Though it was actually disabled in firmware and went undiscovered until 2020 over the years Then there have been a handful of homebrew attempts to record video off of the 3ds some use the Wi-Fi Some replaced the infrared with USB But none were quite successful in getting direct monitor output in real time as for this dev kit It can not only output directly to a monitor But it can output to one monitor for each screen and to this day It is the only official way to get video out from a 3ds game Unfortunately, you can't just take any old 3ds and grab video from it with this box This may look like a normal 3ds It may have buttons and speakers and joysticks and even screens like a 3ds But inside it's actually just a couple of custom boards Everything in here is getting wired back to the main unit through these two big beefy cables And in fact the video signals for these displays Are coming from this guy. We'll kick things off with some stuff We can do without disassembling the unit like wake our software from sleep and by pressing X and Y at the same time Getting some basic debugging information here We see the build number of this particular game the mode of the system which seems to be production We're not a hundred percent sure what these bars are If I had to guess I might say that it was something to do with like frame times, but I am Guessing whoa, what's happening? Oh my god. We're not even capturing that one that one. Let's get it on camera then Hey some of this stuff is gonna be up top some of the stuff's gonna be on the bottom They were still believing in that at the time We spent the last hour figuring out capture for the top because it's out and puts a weird signal Anyway, the point is what we're about to show you is on the bottom Oh And we crashed and we crashed okay press any button to shut it Does it open sometimes? No, it didn't even open in the development mode. I just wanted to see it crash Oh, you just wanted to see it crash. You're just You're just agent of chaos. You're just taking pleasure in my pain at this point. Oh, yeah, I see config All right. Hey, this is looking more interesting. We got some menu settings debug settings user info settings HID settings. Ooh touch panel calibration analog stick calibration. What do we got for menu set it up setting? Oh, I see. I can change my language. Ooh, I can switch over to dev mode. Okay debug settings Latency emulation Wow, you can add latency. What would it be like with a hundred milliseconds of latency? It normally take this long to boot up no and it looks like it's boot cycle Oh, no, I'm in a boot loop into system settings. Oh, that's not a good sign right up here Showing that we're using system 0.0.0. So that that's the firmware version. Oh currently on Did we just lose our firmware? Yeah, we might have we just have no firmware now So we're just going into system settings and that's it. Wait, hold on other settings. Wait, I got this system update boom Yes, there's no way this is gonna work. I figured something out if I hold select while it's booting I can get into the Luma 3ds configuration menu here I don't know that this is gonna help us but what you guys are looking at here is a Hack for the 3ds because this thing is essentially a 3ds You can hack it to run homebrew games or whatever else just like a normal 3ds and this one has had that done This is a bit of a high-risk play but we're gonna try a system update to maybe restore working firmware onto this thing Hopefully that doesn't break the Luma hacks or whatever else I mean, when's the last time the 3ds got a firmware update anyway, an error has occurred unable to update cool. So We bricked it. Oh firmware version point 34.0 And we're back This thing is a nightmare You know what happened was we went into the config menu and while I was tooling around changing stuff One of the settings I changed was under menu setting. I set the menu to test menu Test menu and the test menu is bugged So we need to leave that on home menu The only way we were able to get it back was by going into that menu that flashes up for a second and changing it Back to home menu. Anyone else getting a QA vibe from this user info settings HID settings and calibration LCD settings flicker top flicker bottom Luminance level like you can I guess change the out-of-box experience EULA settings you can oh my god, you can edit it agree version. Whatever. I'll just set my own EULA Nice we can just reset the settings right that seems like a good thing to do. Oh god, what is this? Oh, I reset the ubi Okay, I guess that yep going through this. All right. So wait, can we try the dev menu again then? Oh it crashed our Suspicion is that to load up the dev menu There's some prerequisite that we're not meeting like a piece of software that has to be loaded up or an access code or key Or something along those lines. Unfortunately, it means that we can't access it What we can do though is play video games new Super Mario Brothers 2 Has never looked this big and blurry. Let's go. Oh, wow. That really does look like absolute garbage Would you like a controller maybe wait a controller? Wait, what? Yeah here have a controller. Hold on a second Should I recognize this controller? That's from the Wii. I only know the classic controller on the Wii Well, that's a development controller. This is a development controller. Oh Oh Sick. So wait, wait, wait Shut up. Oh Shoot it works. What the heck it looks just like the Wii classic controller except has actual You know ergonomic handles on it. It's amazing how often you see a development version of a product. You're like, oh, that's way better How did the stupid atrocity that made it to retail ever happen? What the heck else do we have going on here? What is video mode if I change this am I gonna cause problems? Oh, you might but all you need to do is reboot What it does what? vertical oh Oh cool. Wait, why is it? Why is the top screen cloned? Oh This is for 3d projection That's so cool Did they ever actually demo 3ds content? Like this because this is the left and the right view right? Yep. Oh No way What else we got? Okay, so we see only the side-by-side and then that's on a separate screen. Sure fine Okay top bottom 3d sure right because if you're in like a big, you know Demo hall or something like that a lot of the time they would have like vertical You know on the side of the stage or whatever you got to be ready for that sort of thing Even if you never use it, this is wild on the surface the stuff mostly makes sense Here's your SD card slot just like the 3ds had here's your flash card slot where you would put a game you would think Except that this system actually cannot play standard 3ds games that you would buy off the shelf It only plays special Nintendo developer only cartridges Which is I mean seems unnecessary but cool sort of I guess Then we've got okay these we can show in a little bit more detail later But this is handling the inputs coming into the box That's actually doing the compute and then the outputs Sending display out to this and then we've got our external controller and then what the doodad is this? Oh, this is just an IR emitter because why would it need to be small when it's not on a handheld system? I without further ado am ready to finally play some big screen new Super Mario Brothers 2 with a controller This is not emulated folks. This is an actual 3ds This just feels wrong doesn't it like quite wrong indeed. It's wrong and I love it. I did take it apart Oh, wait, we haven't shown the back yet. The back is super trippy. You've got capture over USB That's why we're actually using our VVI to HDMI out into a capture card because the captures Honestly, not great dual VVI outputs That's for your top and bottom display which seem to be some kind of weird variant of 720p And then this is kind of weird. Look at that This is a Wii adapter that goes into a DC power in and then the same AV Output from the Nintendo Wii so it could actually output via component if you really wanted to although It's not clear to me. Ah, yes Okay, it would be in place of DV output one, which is I guess the top screen probably Debugging USB port and there is an external antenna because this is a metal cage Which is not great for RF performance and the easiest way to get it open seems to be to just take off the side panel LTT store comm screwdriver finally shipping to early buyers Wait, should we open up the 3ds first to show people how not normal this is? Oh wow what appears to be more debugging or something over here for the board and then I Mean as advertised Tanner It's just it looks like just basic boards in there to handle the screen and IO where there should be a DS There's just plastic Oh, okay, that is super cool What we're looking at here is an FPGA These are very expensive but very cool because unlike the chip that shipped in your retail 3ds This chip here can actually be Reprogrammed in the field. So if Nintendo during the development of the 3ds hardware were to go Oh gee, you know, we found some bugs or we found a way to improve performance and tweak the actual what will be final silicon They can roll that tweak out to these development boxes so that they will be Essentially the new hardware Of course the drawback is that at Nintendo's scale millions or tens or hundreds of millions of units the cost of these would be Completely untenable in a retail product. What's a cyclone 3 worth? Oh 200 to a thousand dollars Well, because this is still lots of performance for lots of things. Let's say you were developing I don't know a smart door lock or something like that. This can be fully reprogrammed not emulated Reprogrammed to behave exactly the same way that your mass produced chip would so you can much more easily test things without doing a full Tape out which costs millions of dollars. What else are we looking at here? We got two gigs of DDR to memory. That's a lot more than the 3ds had that makes sense because in development builds tend to be Buggier and especially more bloated double-a batteries trying to think why could we possibly need two double-a cells? Maybe we need three volt power. That's a possibility. Well, why don't you start taking it apart and the connections might tell you something I can take it apart more. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Oh, all right. All right, which is the boards. All right, let's do it Hey, there we go. All right. This is definitely our main brain. This is where our power comes What the shut up? There's a we sensor. Wait, is this also a we? Why is there a we IR bar here from what I've been told that was just likely to save money How sure are you that this isn't also a we dev kit? Ah Yeah, we found it. Remember we didn't comment on there being a we IR sensor bar port That's because this doesn't seem to be actually hooked up to anything If you look it was likely a cost saving measure where they just used the same assembly for the AV multi out and sensor bar and then just didn't hook this part up just only hooked up the AV and Does the Wii U this is all you so it uses that same? configuration then What please be a plain English silkscreen explanation of what you are because as far as I can tell This is the actual 3ds not that one. We've got our nan flash. We've got another cyclone 3d No, but there's no RAM here. We've got some Nintendo laser etched arm processor Which makes a lot more sense to be the actual 3ds processor Maybe it includes both whatever revision they were shipping and then also an FPGA So they have the ability to change it up if they need to I'm just guessing at this point to be honest with you guys Do you know the answers to any of this? I have a pretty good guess. Okay, what's your guess go down another layer? Go down a layer. Okay Still no RAM on this board, which is a little confusing But it is host to some of the primary functions of the device wireless connectivity power in The SD card slot as well as the video output and input input Here, I thought this was getting kind of boring. This is the farthest thing from boring Remember what I said about FPGAs being field Reprogrammable what that means is that they can fulfill all sorts of different functions that means this board in spite of its size is probably more of a daughter board acting as just a Bluetooth card and power supply and SD card slot and video output board But if I had to guess based on that, this is the board with our DVI output and our capture USB I would say that this one is probably handling video capture, which would mean that this last one Could very well be the actual brains of our 3ds however My suspicion these three boards are the actual 3ds What do you think? I think you're close close. I think what's actually happening is This board right here. You've got RAM right there. You've got your processor. I want to say right there I can't really read it from here, but this right here is handling your developer output So this is actually running whatever debug interface. We have no way of accessing exactly Okay, and that allows us low-level access to what is probably the actual 3ds right here in the event that we Brick our firmware or something like that through this debug port, which I if I was smart I would have looked at and yeah. Yeah, I think you're right through this debug port I could actually reset this to a factory state or an upgraded state or whatever the case may be now This board is still part of the 3ds miss of it because it otherwise doesn't have a game slot But it's not any more part of it than say for example this Bluetooth module it's it's a daughter board. Okay. Did we ever figure out what these bloody double A's are for? I'm gonna confess. I don't know is it to simulate a like battery loss like power loss like I don't Why would you need a battery in there? The popular theory is real-time clock real-time clock. Oh, okay So basically a CMOS battery, but like with enormous mondo capacity All right fair enough as cool as it is though the partner CTR capture debugger isn't exactly unique And this right here the is nitro capture is actually the previous Generation unit for the Nintendo DS which swimling also sent us is stands for intelligent systems the manufacturer and then nitro was the code name for the Nintendo DS and then Captured of course is what the unit was made to do capture video many of these were used for various promotional and competition events like the Pokemon World Championships according to swimling that's where this unit is suspected to have lived out its days and likely where it got the Dent by the GBA slot that likes to scratch up cartridge labels There's not a whole lot to this one though that we didn't already see it uses a GameCube power adapter rather than a Wii power Adapter GameCube AV cables rather than Wii AV cables and has dip switches to control video settings The controller is a shell of a system just like the partner CTR And it can play all retail DS and GBA games and capturing video can be done over USB However, it's coolest party trick the capture a video off of the DS requires a working install of Japanese Windows XP in order to run the software it also lacks wireless functionality opting instead for an RJ45 jack which on our unit is unfortunately damaged meaning that we have no network connectivity But I guess for the intended use of this unit It makes a ton of sense since events like a Pokemon tournament are inevitably gonna be chock full of wireless interference I mean you can't have your world championship game delayed because a thousand people in the audience are trying to trade Snorlax's and ludicolos. 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