Nintendo 3DS with the Katsukity capture board installed and plugged in

Capturing 3DS gameplay in 2024

 August 23, 2024  Posted in Friday Starter 66 Views

“My Struggle” by Karl Nintendo-ve Knausgaard

The long-term goal of this website has been to capture video from every baseball video game. For this goal, the Nintendo DS and 3DS have long loomed large. These handhelds have big baseball game libraries, especially in the Japan-only area that’s been my core interest. But there is no perfect way to record video from these systems.

Video output? There is no native option for this on either handheld, unlike Sony’s PSP. And there’s no official peripheral for playing on TV like the Game Boy Advance or the PS Vita.

Emulation? Compatibility and performance is very good for the DS, but less good for 3DS. And games that rely on the stylus or other hardware gimmicks can be awkward or even impossible to play with emulation. This would be a useable solution for about half of the games I was looking to record.

Software capture? There is homebrew software for both DS and 3DS that will stream gameplay footage via Wi-Fi to capture software on your computer. I never went far down this path after reading that the framerate was limited, especially for DS games, and video or audio quality drops will happen. For my channel, I decided this wouldn’t be up to my standards.

Hardware capture cards? Through research, it became clear that hardware mods were the only good option. Unfortunately, the company that made and installed most capture cards on the market shut down in 2019.

And while I’ve done some very basic hardware modding in the past (replacing the cartridge slot to restore an old NES, and the simple process of very slightly breaking a SNES to let it play Super Famicom games), I was not interested in learning how to install one of these capture cards myself. I would either need professional installation or to find a second-hand model with a capture card on it.

Finding the right system

After more research, these were my options:

  • Send in a 3DS to Loopy or Merki, the two big remaining names in the capture card install business. The install price is $200-250 for either, and then I’d need to pay to ship the console. I did not already own the correct model of 3DS (the New 3DS XL), so I would have needed to buy a console first before purchasing this service. Loopy is based in the U.S., and Merki in Germany.
  • Buy a second-hand console with capture card already installed on eBay. After watching for a while, there were always only a handful available domestically, all over $500.
  • Buy a second-hand console with capture card already installed from Japan using Buyee. These are more common and less expensive overall (about $250 plus about $50 for shipping), but with the language barrier adding some degree of difficulty. The 3DS will be a Japanese region one, so the UI won’t be in English and the online store (now shut down anyway) will be for JP region games. Physical cartridges are region-free for both the DS and 3DS.

I ended up going with the Buyee option. If I had no Japanese ability, I would have probably gone for Loopy instead. Here’s what I did:

  1. Searched for “Nisetoro” (ニセトロ) on Mercari and Yahoo Auctions using Buyee. The famous Katsukity capture models are commonly known as Nisetoro (a portmanteau of the Japanese word for “counterfeit/lie/pretend” and “retro”) in Japan. In the U.S. they’re either called just Katsukity, Keity, or Optimize capture cards.
  2. To be as safe as possible, I went with a listing that explicitly said it included a product key in the description. The capture software requires a product key after some time. It is reportedly possible to retrieve a lost product key by emailing Optimize.
  3. I ordered the 3DS with capture card pre-installed. I bundled this purchase with other games I was interested in importing, to take advantage of the shipping cost I had to pay anyway.
  4. I did not pay for protective packaging from Buyee. They protect everything well anyway. I used the FedEx International Economy shipping option.

My package was shipped on August 1st and arrived August 5th. Pretty snappy for going halfway across the world.

The setup process

The package arrived with a 3DS and two sheets of printer paper with setup instructions in Japanese and a product key. I turned on the 3DS and went through the normal setup process. The 3DS is designed in a friendly enough way that I don’t think you need any reading ability to get through initial setup. But the Google Translate app’s camera feature is helpful if you get stuck.

A less-detailed English language version of the setup instruction papers that Katsukity sent out appeared in a YouTube video I found:

English language instructions for Katsukity Nisetoro capture card setup for the 3DS.

Regardless of which instructions you use, the katsukity.co.jp URLs no longer return anything. That site is shut down. I found the software here instead. And the drivers to make your computer recognize the 3DS in the first place can be found here.

At least in my case, simply running the .exe to install the driver on Windows 11 did not work. Instead I had to:

  1. Plug the 3DS capture card port into my computer.
  2. Open up Device Manager on Windows 11.
  3. Under “Other Devices,” I selected “Unknown Device,” after unplugging and replugging the 3DS once to confirm it was the one I was looking for.
  4. I double-clicked that unknown device then went through the wizard to install a driver manually, selecting the .exe I downloaded earlier. After that install, my PC could recognize the 3DS where it couldn’t on simply running the driver install .exe by itself.

Now that my 3DS was recognized, I opened the n3DS_view software and went to File > Change the product key to put my key in.

Initially I had some small visual issues on the lower screen, with some tearing every second or so. To fix this, inside the n3DS_view software I went to Config > Calibration and changed the Lower Screen Clock setting until things looked normal.

I initially had no sound. Attempts to plug an audio cable from my 3DS headphone jack into a line in on the computer weren’t immediately successful. Then in n3DS_view I went to Config > Sound settings and ticked “Use the Digital Sound Output beta.” This worked immediately for me without any other changes.

Since then everything has worked with no issues, both with DS and 3DS games. I can use the stylus normally, every game has worked regardless of region, and homebrew should still be available to me if I need it for anything in future.