Question about region lock

[ober]

So I've been reading around and heard that NLP is region locked to Japanese 3DS's only. (Not too surprising after hearing about the anti-piracy methods on LP+ ToT)

So my question is this: I know that it's common practice for Japanese Visual Novels/dating Sims on the PC to be played while having your system set to Japanese Locale (I think it has mostly to do with Unicode and letters displaying correctly, although there may be a few games that require this) which most non-Japanese users can do by changing some system settings. So then is it possible to do something similar with an American made 3DS, or do you literally need a made in Japan 3DS?

Any answer is appreciated, thanks XP

[MorisatoK]

It's the latter option, you need a device from that country which game you want to play.

I'm not sure if the region lock is hardware or firmware based though. If it's the latter one it would be theoretically possible to flash the device with a firmware of another region. But nobody found a way to do this yet I guess.

[.:[R]Plus:.]

say a pair of hackers could work around this idea and somehow accomplice and remove the region lock which eshop would the device log on to and will it last long before nintendo updates the device yet again with newer software that disables all the latest piracy issues?(with every new software update they add more and more lock stuff for hacking firmware that are illegally pirating their machine) each device that operates in a different zone, connects to a unique on-line eshop so i assume things would become much too complicated when you'd have to connect between the European, US or the Japanese eshop, download software or game updates and patches for the other region games games, etc..

so it's safe to say that you should consider buying a Japanese device if you want to play NLP..

what i think can be accomplished in the future is nintendo somehow releasing their own region unlock software update for the machine once they've moved on to another type of new,hot device but even this sounds impossible since they never did this for DSi and it's almost dead now..

[ober]

Didn't think it would have been as simple as choosing a setting from an options menu on the home screen, but I can hope lol

Considering the trouble that it would be going through all of that, buying would be easiest as you said (Besides I have no programming knowledge at all, so hacking and/or modifying my current 3DS would be out of the question.)

Thanks for the replies though guys, I'll just have to be patient and wait for now then. Who knows there may a new NLP bundle that I could snag sometime in the future.

[heyman]

I also think that the difference between 3DS's from different regions is just the firmware. They did something similar with UMD movies for the PSP. If the 3DS ever gets custom firmware, which isn't too unlikely considering how DS flashcards can work on a 3DS, the region lock would likely be removed.