hey guys quick question regarding installing new clean cia games. do we really need to do step 17 and forward all over again every time we install newer games?
Kind of.
You can't downgrade your 9.6 emunand in any way, and you can't install anything into it since you can't use cfw and gw doesn't even work on 9.6 yet (though if you have a gateway this whole clean/legit .cia thing is a waste of your time anyways).
But I do different steps than Chaldron, which I think are easier (your mileage may vary).
First of all, once I have my 4.5 cfw set up with devmenu installed, I do a full backup of my SD with "HDD raw copy tool". This backup can be injected later to skip having to set up your cfw again if you want different games.
But I don't need the gateway launcher at all once I have 4.5 cfw set up. The only reason Chaldron seems to be using it is because cfw emunand (sometimes called rednand) is not compatible with gw/rxTools emunand. But the only difference is for some reason a cfw emunand has 200 bytes of dummy data at the beginning.
So what I do is;
1.) Have cfw set up with devmenu (chaldron's older 4.5 cfw tutorial is a good guide for doing this)
2.) Install as many legit .cias as I can fit on my SD (if you really want to maximize the number of games you can fit, you can usually fit one more game by sending it over the network the same way you installed devmenu by holding L and using that mode along with the installcia/run.bat.)
3.) Take SD out of 3DS, insert into computer's SD reader
4.) Using HxD (a good free hex editor) I choose edit>select block> and select blocks with starting offset 200 and ending offset 3BA001FF, then I copy those blocks and paste them into a new file in hxd (ctrl +c, ctrl +n, ctrl +v). NOTE: depending on your NAND size you might need to copy from starting offset 200 to a different ending offset. In order to be certain which offset to end on, check the size of the NAND.bin dump you should already have (made with gw launcher) and convert it's size into hexadecimal (just use a DEC to HEX converter on the internet, very easy). Whatever your NAND size is in hexadecimal, add 1FF to that and that should give you the "ending offset" to use when using the "select block" command in HxD.
5.) Still in HxD, save the new file that you copied those blocks into as "4.5 emunand.bin" or whatever you think a good name would be
6.) Using emunand tool, which you will already have, just select the "4.5 emunand.bin" you just saved and inject it to your SD
From there you just boot into rxTools making sure you obviously have the firmware.bin, slot0x25KeyX.bin, and rxTools.dat file on your SD root, and make sure you're in RX-E mode in system settings (your firmware with start with RX-E, not RX-S or 4.5) and update without leaving system settings. NOTE: it might be necessary to remove the update nag from sysnand before you update, by holding L + R + A + UP (with wifi on) while turning on your 3DS which will boot you straight to a screen about updating, where you choose cancel which removes the update nag.
If you want to have multiple 9.6 emunands set up with multiple games, you can use "hdd raw copy tool" to make full sd backups and then just inject your different backups to switch games. NOTE: in order to preserve your saves you will need to backup every time you switch
I only have to do this because I'm using my 32gb SD for 4.5 cfw, and using an 8GB SD for legit .cias/9.6 emunand. If you have a 16GB SD you can fit most of the current legit .cias, in which case you'd only ever have to do this process if in the future some more legit .cias that you want come out (which I am thinking won't happen much, since Nintendo is likely to stop including these universal .cias in console bundles in the future)