so my mate has a 2ds opened it up for cleaning and noticed it looked different from what he has seen the pcb look like online is it real or fake or what is it?
I'm going with real. Nothing in that screams fake. Secondly that is a later 2DS not the original (which most photos online will be of). The way to tell is due to the shell color. Also note that your pcb version is FRT-20 not FRT-01 like launch units are. If you actually google you can find a few photo of FRT-20 pcbs. I would say there are two ways to classify 2DS units, units pre jpn launch and units post jpn launch. There is a sizable gap between these. Early units were either white or black as the base color with an accent color of red/blue/teal/pink (plus 2 LE transparent units). After jpn launch the base color changed to a wide range of colors (light blue, blue, red, purple, etc.).
