JAndy

Thanks, that's reassuring. Now I only need to convince whichever company is protecting my prepaid credit card from fraudulent activity that they don't need to block my attempted purchase at nds-card.com...

Oh, I have zero intentions of pirating. I just want to still be able to play the 3DS games I bought. Also, do I understand correctly that you're indirectly saying that after hacking the 3DS, eshop downloads will no longer be possible?

Ok, going for ntrboot then. However, on the product pages of the R4i series of flashcarts it says "R4i [...] card for Nintendo New 3DS[...] to play NDS games not 3ds games". I'm hoping that just means roms you might place on the sd card? Would bum me out something fierce if that meant no more any 3ds games on my 3ds.

I recently got a New 2DS XL to play Pokemon Moon on. Because I still had enough on my Nintendo account (already had a Switch), I bought the digital version of the game, rather than a cartridge. If I understand correctly, the save data for that game is stored on the SD card. I tried putting the SD card into my computer and opening any SAV files I could find on it with PkHex, but none worked. I assume I need to eff around with custom firmware stuff to even generate a savefile PkHex can recognise? I hope to still be able to use the Pokemon Bank to transfer Pokemon to Sword/Shield with in the future, which is why I'd only use PkHex to backup and restore legitimately caught Pokemon. If I do eff around with custom firmware, will that still be possible? On https://3ds.hacks.guide/ it says "firmware 11.13.0 or below". In the settings of my console it says "11.13.0-45E". Does that "-45E" at the end still count as 11.13.0 or is that already above?