Atari 2600 on the 3DS

Stella Atari 2600 Emulator for the DS

Atari 2600 emultaion running on a 3DS

About 7 or 8 years ago I figured out how to bypass region-lock on the Nintendo 3DS so my kids could play the games we bought in Italy. With the release of the Switch soon after, they haven’t even looked at their 3DS in years…..but I have! While researching how to get demo roms of the gorgeous Atari 2600 cartridges created by Champ Games running on Retropie, I came across an emulation project that promised to get them working on a 3DS.* I quickly abandoned the Retropie route and went all-in on getting StellaDS (the Atari 2600 emulator for the DS) running on one of my kids’ discarded handhelds.†

Screenshot of 3S Hacks Guide website (click to be brought there)

Screenshot of 3S Hacks Guide

In order to get StellaDS running you first need to hack your 3DS and get homebrew installed. The site 3DS Hacks Guide has an absolutely brilliant walk-through for getting homebrew up and running on your DS. I have an older US region 3DS that’s on the latest firmware, so I was pushed to the MSET9 hack. I followed the straight-forward directions (it looks far worse than it really is) and was able to get the DS hacked and homebrew installed in no time.

Universal Updater

StellaDS app in the Universal-Update after installing homebrew

Once installed you have access to the Universal-Updater, a homebrew app store where you can download and run the StellaDS emulator, although before doing that I recommend  downloading and installing the Twilight Menu++, a nice interface for your 3DS to access applications you get from the Universal-Updater. Additionally, the homebrew app store has other emulators for Atari 5200 and 7800 games, as well as a really nice ColecoVision emulator—all quite impressive. They’re freely available for non-commercial use from the Universal-Updater app store, but you do need to add the ColecoVision, Atari5200, and Atari7800 bios files to the root of your 3DS SD card to get those emulators to work.‡ I have to give a huge shout-out to wavemotion-dave (or Dave Bernazzani) for his amazing work on helping to develop and continuing to maintain these emulators. Niche communities like this are often small and relatively fragile, and the work of one person can carry the lion’s share of the load—so major kudos and huge thanks for all you do, Dave.

Atari 2600 on 3DS

The Atari 2600 Haunted House on the 3DS

I now have Atari 2600 games running on an old 3DS cleanly, and the experience is impressive. I love the lower touchscreen that allows you to reset/restart games with a simple touch. You can also press the cartridge space to change which game you want to play, it really makes the experience.

Wizard of Wor for 3dS

Champ Games version of Wizard of Wor

Coming full circle, the Champ Games play perfectly on this emulator which allowed me to finally scratch that itch. Those games are so good. They’re essentially hand-picked updates of Atari 2600 games like Elevator Action, Galaga, Super Cobra, Scramble, Wizard of Wor, etc. The quality of the game design is truly extraordinary, arguably some of the best games I’ve ever played for the Atari 2600. Galagon is essentially an identical copy of the arcade version of Galaga running seamlessly on an Atari 2600, which is insane for 11 year old me. The same can be said for Elevator Agent and Wizard of Wor, but this discussion might be worth a separate post given there is much to say about the awesomeness of these games.

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*The issue with my Retropie is it’s running lr-stella14, a very stable version of the Atari 2600 emulator, but it’s unable to handle the more sophisticated demands of the Champ Games. When I tried to update to the latest version of lr-stella I was running into all sorts of issues, so I jumped ship from the Retropie given I really just wanted to demo the Champ Games to see which physical versions I would buy, but more on that in another post.

†We have two DS consoles in the house, but I could only find the older, smaller 3DS. I know there’s a 3DS XL lying around somewhere, but no luck locating it thus far.

‡I have included all the ROMS/BIOS files for Atari 5200, Atari 7800, and ColecoVision in the following zip file. Just unzip and add all files to the root of the 3DS SD card and all three emulators should work: 3ds_bios_roms_a52_a78_coleco

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