Homebrew GPU RE : need everyone's help

smealum

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hi everyone.

SHARED GOOGLE DOC FOR LISTING PROGRESS : https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/19O3nOuo9E29GVSYsyODy37sq_TBbKYyfZSBIHR2X2xI/edit#gid=0

as some of you may know i've put a lot of work into REing the 3DS's GPU so that it can be used for homebrew (as have others, such as staplebutter). we've made great progress but there's still a long way to go. one way we've been able to RE the hardware is by looking at the software that interfaces with it, and the software that runs on it.
to put things simply, the GPU is programmable and can run things called shaders. shaders are made of a bunch of instructions, and we've so far identified every single one we've encountered. however, we can't be sure that we've found every one of them. one way to gain confidence that we have/haven't is simply to look at a bunch of games' shaders. however, i only own so many games, and the same goes for everyone else working on this.

so what i'd like is for everyone capable of decrypting 3DS roms to pitch in by looking into the romfs partition of the games they own and letting us know what they find.

all you need to do is decrypt your games, extract the romfs partition, search it for shader files and run those files through aemstro. then, look at aemstro's output and specifically search for the string "???". if you find it, let me know what game it was and what the filename was. it's that simple !

finding the shader files might be tough for some games. if you're not sure whether you've found them all, please reflect that on the google doc sheet.

easy ways to find shaders :
- just run aemstro on the decrypted romfs blob (it will take a while but should find any uncompressed shader in there !)
- look for .shbin, .sbin, .bch, .bcsdr, .bsm files in romfs

you can find aemstro here : https://github.com/smealum/aemstro . you'll need python3 to run it.

this may seem like a trivial task, and, well, it kind of is. however, it has the potential to be extremely helpful. if this works out well i'd love to crowdsource the search for more things in 3DS games in the future.

thank you for your time and help; let me know if you have any questions.
 

daxtsu

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Have you been keeping a list of games that have already been examined? No sense in duplicating work that's already been done.
 
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xem

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wouldn't it be easier to find an official 3DS SDK documentation? (assuming a 3DS SDK documentation contains these information, and assuming that we can find it)
 

Cjuub

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wouldn't it be easier to find an official 3DS SDK documentation? (assuming a 3DS SDK documentation contains these information, and assuming that we can find it)

Maybe. But the SDK leak is illegal and afaik smea and co don't want to base their work on it, but rather find the information by reversing.
 
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trastorillo

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Mmmhhhh. So, just couple of details. U r talking about games from eshop or card games...
Is this data at the SD? Or we have to dump something. Could help, if it can be done throug ninhax. Just a dumb friendly tutorial could b handy.
 

FAST6191

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And how would you verify that someone who contributes to this list will only look into roms he actually owns?

That is more benefit of the doubt, it is when people start using SDK variable names, making the same mistakes the SDK, suffering the same limits as the SDK and clearly being derived from the SDK that troubles appear.

Back on topic. This would be a good time for the "every dump needs its XORPAD to go along with it". It reminds me though that I still have to get my every DS ROM analysis project up and running.
 

smealum

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very impressed with the number of games on that list already ! thanks everyone. :) keep going !

wouldn't it be easier to find an official 3DS SDK documentation? (assuming a 3DS SDK documentation contains these information, and assuming that we can find it)

it would also be easier to just use the SDK rather than try to build devkitarm, ctrulib, aemstro and such. it would also be completely and legal and take away what little legitimacy the homebrew scene has. so please keep this kind of comment to yourself in the future.
 

FAST6191

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To be fair the original xbox also used a leaked SDK for the vast vast majority of its homebrew.

Granted it had the knock on effect of making compiled binaries annoying to find and distribute which was not fun, give or take the eventual semi private FTP setup being more robust/long lived than similar vintage cheap/free web hosts and it seeing a lot of it get released as open source.
 

themperror

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I've got a number of games not listed under the google doc (as of this moment), but I have no idea how to do this. Any links to what's required and how to go about this? All I have is 9.2, and using Ninjhax. No Gateway and such.

In order to decrypt games you need 4.x, I think you ARE able to downgrade with the gateway go exploit (you don't need a gateway for it), but downgrading hasn't be qualified as safe yet (though no bricks till now)
After that just follow a guide to get XORPADS for a game and it'll explain it from there..
 

DiscostewSM

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In order to decrypt games you need 4.x, I think you ARE able to downgrade with the gateway go exploit (you don't need a gateway for it), but downgrading hasn't be qualified as safe yet (though no bricks till now)
After that just follow a guide to get XORPADS for a game and it'll explain it from there..


I was afraid of that. I'm not very keen on downgrading.
 

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