Yes, you really can play NES games on your Nintendo 3DS. And I am not talking about the virtual console, which has a limited selection of games available.

Before I get in to the nitty gritty of it all. I need to point out that you need some additional hardware in order to use this emulator. It costs about $20.00 with shipping, and it will let you run NesDS as well as countless other homebrew games and applications. It's the R4 3DS that I talked about in my last post. You can find out more at the official r4 store about the cards, and I'll post some info and FAQ posts about them as well, since I've been using one since my first Nintendo DS console.

Now, other than the r4 3ds, you'll also need to download the nesDS emulator from the sourceforge page for it. It's actually really easy to set it up and start using it.

You'll want to copy over the nesDS.nds file to the micro SD card that you're using for your R4. Once you have it copied over, it's just a matter of getting some of the NES roms you want to actually load and play on your 3DS system. Places like coolroms.com and various other rom web sites that preserve these old games in ROM format will have pretty much anything you could possibly want to play.

I recommend setting up the micro sd card with a folder calles NES, so that you can copy all of the NES games you have right in to that folder, and not have to mess around with hunting each and every game down on your micro SD card. I tend to do this for all of my games / emulator files anyway. This way I know exactly where to look when I want to load a game up.

NesDS on the Nintendo DSi XL - Works The Same On The Nintendo 3DS XL

nes on 3ds

Play NES On Your 3DS