Sky3DS, the “out of the blue” 3DS piracy Flashcart

Those of you following the 3DS scene might have known for a while about the Sky3DS, a new type of flashcart allowing people to play 3DS roms on the 3DS, up to the latest firmwares 9.xx.

The device kind of came out of the blue, and many questions were surfacing in the early days:Information about the device started appearing less than 2 weeks ago, and the SKy3DS is now available for sale on hardware modification sites. The team behind the device also released a piece of software required to copy the roms from one’s computer onto the Sky3ds. Hackers are already busy trying to reverse engineer that piece of software to see if it could help understanding the vulnerability leveraged by the Sky3DS.

In particular, the Sky3DS lets one copy up to 10 roms on a memory card, and play them on any 3DS. What was not clear for a while was the details of that “10 rom slots” limitation. Can the 10 games be replaced to one’s heart content by replacing files on the SD Card? The FAQ of the Sky3DS site seems to be pretty clear at this point though: you get to choose 10 games, copy them, and that’s it, those are the 10 games you will be playing with that cart. If you want to play another game, the 11th one, you cannot, it seems, delete one of the other ones and replace it. Instead, you’ll have to buy another Sky3DS cart, which will let you, once again, copy 10 more games.

The Sky3DS was rumored to be a fake initially, but it appears to now be in stock on several retailers’ websites.

The device sells for prices around $90. This basically means people buying this device pay $9 per pirated game. This is an interesting situation, as this is clearly very expensive for piracy, but also remains less expensive than buying the actual game, so some people will surely be interested in that.

The Sky3DS is of no use for people who are looking for a “region free” 3DS (roms from the wrong region will simply not run. Although their FAQ mentions that a game from the wrong region, copied by mistake, will not count as one of the 10 game slots), and it is also not going to enable homebrews.

For obvious reasons I will not link to that device’s site, but you can see a very long and interesting discussion thread about Sky3DS on GBATemp, as well as on /talk

What do you think? Is that a device you’d buy? What is your take on a device that is openly promoting only “backups” support, and no homebrew?

Note: We have contacted the Sky3DS team several times asking to test the device, but they have yet to respond. As such, we cannot confirm at this point if the device actually does what it claims to.