[TuxSH]

You can of course run DS (and GBA) software on 3DS.

> My only hesitation is the firmware update

If you "hack" your 3DS you will not have to worry about sysupdates anymore. It is slightly more straightforward to do so if your system version is <= 11.14, and quite trivial if <= 11.3.

As for homebrew dev on 3DS, you have a lot more RAM and a "proper" CPU with somewhat modern CPU concepts (an actual OS, virtual memory, caches, multicore).

Unlike the DS and GBA, the 3DS has an actual GPU (well, kinda, it doesn't have programmable fragment shaders), which was designed around a custom flavor of OpenGL ES and it shows; citro3d is a shim, other than stateful state tracking and mem allocation, it mostly exposes the GPU hw as-is.

Overall, I think it is easier for people to get started with 3DS homebrew development and that it provides more transferable skills (w/r/t OpenGL-like APIs).

Disclaimer: I'm the lead maintainer of Luma3DS, am a core maintainer of libctru, and wrote significant parts of the exploit chains the guide uses. Feel free to ask around.

[seabass-labrax]

Luma3DS and the community around it is excellent; thank you TuxSH! Your community provides better software and better support than Nintendo does with all their trillion-Yen revenue available to them; you deserve to be proud of that achievement.

[TuxSH]

You're welcome!

By the way, I have something related rather large in the works, look forward for a "Show HN" ;) (hopefully this quarter!)

> better support than Nintendo does with all their trillion-Yen revenue available to them

Well, they had to develop the entire OS, all GUI applications and SDK (and docs, and tooling...). It would also be far from surprising if they moved significant headcount to developing the Switch after the 3DS launched (and considering the Wii U's apparent failure).

There have been traces of Switch 2 stuff in Switch 1 kernel 3 years (?) before the S2 launched, so, in terms of planning, this tracks.