Homebrew DS(i) Mode hacking progress thread
- Thread starter Billy Acuña
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I kinda assume the 3DS had some sort of GBA emulation (not anymore though
), since that's the DS we're talking about. The DSi doesn't have any GBA hardware, does it?Goes to show how cheap older technology gets, the 3DS has hardware backwards compatibility for 2 systems! ...If only two other huge companies could follow Nintendo in that..
Well it actually kinda does... since the arm7 that the DS uses is the same as the GBA uses (or at least it's close enough to work properly) so if you were to hack the DSi properly you might be able to make it play GBA games... maybe not thoughI kinda assume the 3DS had some sort of GBA emulation (not anymore though
Goes to show how cheap older technology gets, the 3DS has hardware backwards compatibility for 2 systems! ...If only two other huge companies could follow Nintendo in that..
I doubt anyone's going to bother with the DSi nowadays.
Wasn't too long ago WulfyStylez released the whole TWLTool thing, and with the 3DS community hacking into the DSi mode we might make some discoveries... never know
Well, we have the hardware to handle three systems (3DS, DS and GBA), so maybe we can get a way to run both DS and GBA in 3DS mode, but needs a lot of reverse engineering to get that.
We have AGB_FIRM and some fairly good GBA emulators, why would we want GBA games in 3DS mode? DS mode yeah, but that'd take a lot of per-game patching...
Wireless Adapter emulation, in-game menu, fullscreen. AGB_FIRM is great, but it has limitations.
Yeah, but 3DS doesn't need to emulate GBA games when can run them natively. GBA emulation doesn't makes sense on 3DS IMO.
AGB_FIRM is limited in terms of features (which it doesn't really have any). if an emulator like gpSP can run a game good enough then I'll probably use that instead.
Well patching each and every single game doesn't make much sense either (since that's pretty much what you'd have to do to get the GBA games running properly in 3DS mode). Emulation, on the other hand, is feasible and actually already exists. So, you can wait for your pipe dream or just use something already available... up to you
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just saw this thread. i looked into twl mode with some custom debugging hardware a while back for reasons and i should have a bunch of notes somewhere but the gist of what might be relevant off the top of my head is :
- you can totally make it load your own roms relatively easily if you want to, for example by editing twl_bg, the background process that runs on the arm11...
- ...but that's more or less limited to homebrew. basically the problem remains that the game will try to access data from a non-existant gamecard. you could potentially force it to run in twl instead of ntr and redirect rom and save to sd or nand, it the game might not even run due to some funky memory mapping differences. (something to do with mirrors iirc)
- even with legit games, you're pretty limited in terms of what improvements you could make to the twl_form experience. basically switching into twl mode completely disconnects the arm11 (the only thing running 3ds mode code at that point) from fcram, which is where most (?) twl memory lives. I tried but failed to bring that bus back up. so basically arm11 can't affect twl stuff : can't edit memory, can't control execution in any way (in fact, hitting home doesn't even pause execution iirc)
- the arm11 is responsible for fetching the DS frame buffers from lgyfb and displaying it. so you can totally change the way it does that, apply some post processing to that if you're into that, but that's basically it. I have some documentation on lgyfb, but the gist of it is there's some configuration for the upscale filter, and then it uses its own DMA engine to fetch the actual data.
not sure if this information will be useful to anyone, but I figured posting it wouldn't hurt.
- you can totally make it load your own roms relatively easily if you want to, for example by editing twl_bg, the background process that runs on the arm11...
- ...but that's more or less limited to homebrew. basically the problem remains that the game will try to access data from a non-existant gamecard. you could potentially force it to run in twl instead of ntr and redirect rom and save to sd or nand, it the game might not even run due to some funky memory mapping differences. (something to do with mirrors iirc)
- even with legit games, you're pretty limited in terms of what improvements you could make to the twl_form experience. basically switching into twl mode completely disconnects the arm11 (the only thing running 3ds mode code at that point) from fcram, which is where most (?) twl memory lives. I tried but failed to bring that bus back up. so basically arm11 can't affect twl stuff : can't edit memory, can't control execution in any way (in fact, hitting home doesn't even pause execution iirc)
- the arm11 is responsible for fetching the DS frame buffers from lgyfb and displaying it. so you can totally change the way it does that, apply some post processing to that if you're into that, but that's basically it. I have some documentation on lgyfb, but the gist of it is there's some configuration for the upscale filter, and then it uses its own DMA engine to fetch the actual data.
not sure if this information will be useful to anyone, but I figured posting it wouldn't hurt.
Last edited by smealum,
