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RG DS

A perspective of someone who's never owned a DS/3DS

Updated on: December 31 - 2025

Table of contents

Price and shipping to Slovakia

I chose the cheapest variant without an SD card which is 95USD. The shipping is 15$, add VAT, in total I paid 132.96USD. That's 117 EUR at the time of writing. Huge shoutout to Donald Trump for making the dollar lose its value.

Delivery took 11 days from the time I placed the order which is really good.

Performance

DS

Every single DS game I tried ran perfectly. As expected. I don't have much to say, anything you load will work. I'm using the Scale2X shader.

3DS

Unfortunately, this is RG DS, and the only games I'm interested in and that run well are Animal Crossing: New Leaf and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Pokemon Alpha Sapphire.



This video showcases that other games can run well (100% speed most of the time with occasional dips), however I couldn't replicate New Super Mario Bros. 2's Performance. On my device, using the stock Azahar it runs at around 70% speed which makes it unplayable.

I would love to play more 3DS titles but I also love saving 200 euro compared to Ayn Thor so no complaints here.

The only setting I had to change in Azahar is go to layout and change the top screen's aspect ratio so it doesn't stretch the image. Everything worked out of the box, including the gyroscope.

Battery life

Like the reviews say, around 4 hours. It's an underpowered android phone with a medium battery that has to run 2 screens. I get it.

It's also incapable of sleeping. Leaving it alone for half a day means your battery will drain by tens of percent.

Anbernic's launcher

I couldn't get it to launch my 3DS games, and it doesn't seem to support cover arts, thus making it useless in my opinion. I prefer to launch the games via the emulator aps.

Custom wallpapers

You can set a different wallpaper for each screen. This is cool. So what I did was create a new project in gimp with this resolution 640 × 1160, which is the two screens stacked on each other + 200 pixels accounting for the gap between them.

Next I put in a horizontal guide, used the Measure Tool to measure 100px in each direction and placed two guides there.




After that I used the Crop to Content tool to export each part of the image separately. The part in the middle gets lost, "covered" by the space between the screens.


You can then set the images for each screen to achieve the effect of a continous wallpaper.

Loading games

This was something I was curious about, whether the Anbernic launcher was necessary to launch the games correctly to utilize both screens. No it's not. Launching games directly from Drastic and Azahar works the same, and each app asks where to load games from, so you can dump your ROMs anywhere you want and point them to it during the initial setup.