Picking up a second hand, untested, New 3DS XL, from its condition I was inclined to expect it’d be fine if only given a charger and turns out that I was right. Fortunately, the stack of games didn’t go missing like the original charger did and USB-A to 3DS Family chargers are still cheap. So are styli for that matter, which it also didn’t come with but hey, it’s basically a thrift store deal :).
Overall the system is in tidy condition. Small scratch across the main screen and some minor scratching on the cover plates, but overall it’s in good shape for a device that came out a decade ago. The tricky part is the device wasn’t wiped since no one had a charger, and for whatever reason the original owner never wiped it before hand. Doing a factory reset is a little more complicated when there’s a parental control PIN lock and you have no way of reaching the original owner. The security question also wasn’t the device’s region, so could only guess at that. Today, there’s websites that can figure out the ways around that, but I figured why not try some obvious ones first before giving up on PIN?
Well, outside of video games I have never seen a PIN code that is actually an obvious one or scribbled down nearby hidden under a book or something. Like, who really does that?! 😂 The first PIN code that I tried was the month/day entered on the device’s user profile, and lo and behold it unlocked!
About five minutes later I was running with a freshly reformatted system memory and reformatted MicroSD card. Plus a few years of back firmware updates because surprisingly those are still out there, even if the eshop backend is no longer open for new business.