My 4 year old is obsessed with Super Mario 64 (good choice!) and I sometimes let him play the hacked port version on my New 3DS XL, but the other day it stopped working almost entirely. When you pushed the power button the blue light would turn on, and you could hear some sounds… but the screen never lit up. I did some reading online and I guess this is a fairly common 3DS issue with a multitude of possible causes: The black screen of death (BSOD).
Well I ran through the list and nothing was working. I tried leaving it on for 10 minutes, pulling the battery, updating the Custom Firmware, performing a CTRTransfer, restoring a NAND backup (thankfully I made one when I installed the CFW in the first place), even trying the more insane sounding CTRTransfer Type D9 script (and I had to find an older copy of the CTRTransfer file as the newest one didn’t seem to work with this script), and NOTHING worked.
Then I refined my search with the additional information that I could still hear the sound, and that let me to this thread post claiming that the camera might be broken, and unplugging it’s ribbon cable might solve the issue.
Holy crap that worked! I have no idea how anyone ever figured out that a broken camera could cause your system not to boot but I sure am thankful they did!
- Image from the GBATemp Form post detailing the issue.
@Jordy Thank you for posting this. I've got a New 3DS XL as well, and I use it nearly every day, even if only for ten minutes. I'm going to need to make use of fixes like this some day, too.
@Jordy sometimes happen to me on my New 3DS **with custom firmware** – powers up, sound, I can interact (buttons + touch screen working) but no screens. I was forcing shutdown but I noticed I just have to close the console and reopen it. Times ago it did crash too the game cart detection, even up to break the power charging. I was about to solder a new connector when everything went back to absolute normal state. Very very weird.