Why you should hack your consoles!
Many of you, including myself before this, have had old consoles sitting in drawers because they're your childhood, still in good condition and most of the time because you repeatedly say that you're going to use them, yet never do.
For me, it was the 3DS, for you, it could even be the original DS, a Wii or even a Wii U.
Whilst in the modern day, these devices seem useless and outdated, especially with the hate for the Wii U ever since it's release.
Though, your old consoles have a long lifetime ahead of them - even with multiplayer!
For the DS and Wii, it's Wiimfi
For the 2DS/3DS and Wii U, it's Pretendo
And for the Switch, someone will make something in the future because we all know Nintendo isn't keeping online support.
Homebrewing these devices (all of these except some models of the Switch) are all soft-moddable, meaning you don't need any knowledge on technology or soldering.
For all of the listed devices, all you need is an SD card (and in the case of the original DS and DS Lite, a flash cart) and something to put files onto it.
For earlier consoles, their is also flash carts for stuff like the NES, Gameboy, N64 and others.
Systems like the Gamecube can also be hard modded (physical changes through things like soldering) to have an SD card slot instead of a disk drive aswell.
Even if you don't care for playing online (which is surprisingly fun, especially with friends), you can still install emulators, fan-made games and rom hacks on your old devices with no restrictions!
The WiiU (cough comfier and better designed, just not as good games
Along with this, the Wii U emulator Cemu allows for connections to Pretendo - the replacement for Nintendo Network - allowing for people on emulators to connect to people playing on genuine hardware, making the system more accessible to those even without a Wii U (systems like this may exist for other emulators but I'm unsure).
With homebrew, you can also load digital copies of your games, and backup your save files from digital and physical games (and also have the ability to convert these to modern game files, e.g: Minecraft Legacy to Java/Bedrock)
To hack one of these devices, all you would need is a single SD card (or MicroSD card for the new models of 2DS/3DS) or a MicroSD to SD Adaptor. Costing around £6.99 for 32GB ($9.48 USD).
Guides for soft modding your devices!
Any devices that are not listed I couldn't find a guide for, I suggest simply searching up flash carts for said system, e.g: the R4 Flashcart for the DS.
This does not include non-nintendo systems as I've only ever hacked Nintendo systems, other stuff like the XBOX consoles, Playstation consoles and even things such as VRs can be homebrewed for your own needs!
This does not damage any of your devices and is also fully reversible, with hacks through flash carts not even changing anything on the device itself!
Join the Galaktisk discord which has a section for homebrew (and support with it)
TLDR: Hack your old consoles, play emulators and online again - have fun!