Homebrew Homebrew vs. Gateway? What Can I Do Now w/ Homebrew?

[ofDragons]

I already have a gateway for my N3DS and then I have my always-up-to-date old 3DS where I play bought games. I saw that you can download homebrew to the latest firmware so I thought to myself "what the heck might as well do it before it gets patched". After downloading it and whatnot, I have no idea what I can do with it that I can't already do with my gateway? I mainly use my gateway to play hacked roms and that's basically it. Suggestions?

 

[Ar7ific1al]

From what I've gathered over the months, you can do just about everything with homebrew that you can do with gateway. Downgrade, install and play games you don't own (piracy), bypass region checks, use cheats on a certain CFW, etc.

It mostly depends on your FW and system. IMO there's no need for Gateway anymore. Gateway seems to me like one of those things people jumped on out of impatience. I waited for something like CFW to be able to do the same things and save money.

 

[daxtsu]

CFWs can do everything Gateway can except for playing .3ds ROMs directly. CFWs use CIA files instead, which install the games to your 3DS's internal SD card, and then have icons on the Home Menu, like eShop games. If you need the "convenience" or space savings of .3ds files, then stick with Gateway.

 

[osm70]

Gateway has better cheats.

 

[Purple_Heart]

its easier and better to cheat on gateway but it is necessary?

edit: i have a Gateway 3DS by the way

 

[DarkIrata]

With Gateway you have a stable, full tested work backend. You dont have to pray that the cfw still get updates or will work specilly for your system and and.
If you are bored, cfw are enough.. if you want a fast and secure solution, gateway is unbeaten.

 

[Ekaitz]

With Gateway you have a stable, full tested work backend. You dont have to pray that the cfw still get updates or will work specilly for your system and and.
If you are bored, cfw are enough.. if you want a fast and secure solution, gateway is unbeaten.

Wrong.
CFW were updated before GW emunand for 9.6+ support on n3DS...
CFW are fast and secure, they are exactly the same as gateway except for .3DS and cheat.

Sorry, but what you're telling... That's just nonsense.

 

[DarkIrata]

Wrong.
CFW were updated before GW emunand for 9.6+ support on n3DS...
CFW are fast and secure, they are exactly the same as gateway except for .3DS and cheat.

Sorry, but what you're telling... That's just nonsense.

i think you doesnt really understood what i mean.
Fast - Fast Stable Updates AND easy to setup / get.
Secure - Better have something a few prople who make this for a living or some hobby developer just try and error his way through? (Sure not for all)
Stable - Mostly you will get updates and there is just a minimal chance thats the next day they would say, we stopped develope.

The only + on cfw are, they are mostly open source~ at least something.

 

[CreAtor135]

Guys, guys, his O3DS is always updated. Meaning it's on 10.4. Meaning he can't downgrade.

MEANING NO CFW OR PIRACY

At the moment, what you can do with Homebrew is play emulators, homebrew games, and get custom themes for your console. It may be small at the moment, but the homebrew scene is ever expanding and I strongly believe it'd be worthwhile in the future. Homebrew won't do anything your Gateway can as of now, on firmware 10.4. But I guess you should watch closely and see how it evolves.

*EDIT* Also, you can play ROM Hacks now. Forgot to mention that.

 

[DarkIrata]

Guys, guys, his O3DS is always updated. Meaning it's on 10.4. Meaning he can't downgrade.

At the moment, what you can do with Homebrew is play emulators, homebrew games, and get custom themes for your console. It may be small at the moment, but the homebrew scene is ever expanding and I strongly believe it'd be worthwhile in the future. Homebrew won't do anything your Gateway can as of now, on firmware 10.4. But I guess you should watch closely and see how it evolves.

I never said it will never be better. But it will take a while, and maybe there will be another hbl which will be integrated into gateway or the opposit and gateways go opensource and hbl have full gw support. We cant predict the future, so we have to see it from the current moment.

 

[Dax_Fame]

Yeah lol GW pretty much stole the work from others recently... But then again, others stole from GW in the first place. There really is no moral high ground when it comes to this stuff, so just play the damn games.

...

..

..

Oh yeah, no brick code on CFWs that's a pretty big "feature"

 

[alevan]

Gateway is more stable, easier to set up and to use. More secure too (if you don't end up using a clone or a faulty model with the latest launcher.dat, then you have a brick).

Also, it's faster to copy a .3ds to an SDCard, than to copy a .cia to an SDCard and install it to that same SDCard...

 

[Dax_Fame]

I never said it will never be better. But it will take a while, and maybe there will be another hbl which will be integrated into gateway or the opposit and gateways go opensource and hbl have full gw support. We cant predict the future, so we have to see it from the current moment.

Open source GW? Never going to happen bud. Talk about dreaming big.

Gateway is more stable, easier to set up and to use. More secure too (if you don't end up using a clone or a faulty model with the latest launcher.dat, then you have a brick).

Also, it's faster to copy a .3ds to an SDCard, than to copy a .cia to an SDCard and install it to that same SDCard...

Except for the fact that the brick code they included is also nipping their own loyal fan base, not just clones. Low as the chances may be, they are present. I will be staying far away from GW and any of it's clones.

 

[Tomy Sakazaki]

As user of both gateway and CFW.

GW is faster than CFW to boot?
Nope if you use the same entrypoint for both options, both take similar times.
However GW launcher is less reliable, having lower boot rates, and they get worse on some 3DS models (mainly the original 3DS on small factor).

GW is easier to setup?
Depends on what you're taking into account, the most difficult part on both GW and CFWs setup is the entrypoints, that are the same for both.

There are only 3 difficult matters with CFW right now, you must obtain Nintendo copyrighted files by yourself, devs won't host them because they are easier to be found and sued than GW Team. The other difficult is getting the proper CIAs files to use on your setup (Region Free, Cryptofixed, etc), while on GW you generally just drag and drop .3DS files, but if you use the ROM to play online you must inject a header into it, while CIA files doesn't require this extra step.
[EDIT1]The third difficulty (that I've forgot before), is that to use cheats on CFW you must use NTR over the CFW, in GW it's included on their menu.[/EDIT1]

What was hard before actually was to decide what CFW you should use, because when devs started developing CFW for 3DS they had different sets of functions to end user, and it was harder to get a "all in one solution".
Now most of CFW support almost the same functions.



GW is safer to use?
If GW Team removed completely the brick code of their launcher both have the same security degree, if not, CFWs are safer to use.
[EDIT2]Probably people are confusing the security and stability of the downgrading process with the security to actually use CFW and GW.
The majority of the GW user base were already using a 3DS console on 4.X to 9.2 versions, so when the updated sysUpdater was released to support 10.3 they didn't bat a eye, this mattered only to those who had some 3DS units with versions > 9.2 lying and wanted to run GW or CFW on them (like me that had 2 units on this situation).
So yes, it's easy to those who didn't care about downgrading consoles to confuse "I've bricked my console while downgrading" with "I've bricked my console while setting up rxTools/Cakes/ReiNAND", but in reality all bricking was due to errors with older versions of donwgraders or user errors, not CFW's.
And people that updated the sysNAND to 10.4 thinking that they were updating emuNAND would make the exact same error while setting GW emunand.[/EDIT2]

 

[cvskid]

Guys, guys, his O3DS is always updated. Meaning it's on 10.4. Meaning he can't downgrade.

MEANING NO CFW OR PIRACY

At the moment, what you can do with Homebrew is play emulators, homebrew games, and get custom themes for your console. It may be small at the moment, but the homebrew scene is ever expanding and I strongly believe it'd be worthwhile in the future. Homebrew won't do anything your Gateway can as of now, on firmware 10.4. But I guess you should watch closely and see how it evolves.

*EDIT* Also, you can play ROM Hacks now. Forgot to mention that.

You can still have piracy on 10.4 using a sky3ds+ flash cart. It's just that people are too cheap to want to pay for anything.

 

[CreAtor135]

As user of both gateway and CFW.

GW is faster than CFW to boot?
Nope if you use the same entrypoint for both options, both take similar times.
However GW launcher is less reliable, having lower boot rates, and they get worse on some 3DS models (mainly the original 3DS on small factor).

GW is easier to setup?
Depends on what you're taking into account, the most difficult part on both GW and CFWs setup is the entrypoints, that are the same for both.

There are only 3 difficult matters with CFW right now, you must obtain Nintendo copyrighted files by yourself, devs won't host them because they are easier to be found and sued than GW Team. The other difficult is getting the proper CIAs files to use on your setup (Region Free, Cryptofixed, etc), while on GW you generally just drag and drop .3DS files, but if you use the ROM to play online you must inject a header into it, while CIA files doesn't require this extra step.
[EDIT1]The third difficulty (that I've forgot before), is that to use cheats on CFW you must use NTR over the CFW, in GW it's included on their menu.[/EDIT1]

What was hard before actually was to decide what CFW you should use, because when devs started developing CFW for 3DS they had different sets of functions to end user, and it was harder to get a "all in one solution".
Now most of CFW support almost the same functions.



GW is safer to use?
If GW Team removed completely the brick code of their launcher both have the same security degree, if not, CFWs are safer to use.
[EDIT2]Probably people are confusing the security and stability of the downgrading process with the security to actually use CFW and GW.
The majority of the GW user base were already using a 3DS console on 4.X to 9.2 versions, so when the updated sysUpdater was released to support 10.3 they didn't bat a eye, this mattered only to those who had some 3DS units with versions > 9.2 lying and wanted to run GW or CFW on them (like me that had 2 units on this situation).
So yes, it's easy to those who didn't care about downgrading consoles to confuse "I've bricked my console while downgrading" with "I've bricked my console while setting up rxTools/Cakes/ReiNAND", but in reality all bricking was due to errors with older versions of donwgraders or user errors, not CFW's.
And people that updated the sysNAND to 10.4 thinking that they were updating emuNAND would make the exact same error while setting GW emunand.[/EDIT2]

I agree with most of your points. But here's my comment. I'm pretty sure you can't accidentally update sysNAND with Gateway. Even if both NANDs are linked, Gateway has never failed to update specifically emuNAND. Or at least, not for me. Also, the brick code. I'm almost ALMOST certain that 100% of the time Gateway will only brick DSTWO+ and other clones. Yes, there were reports of users bricking with Gateway, but that was when they first implemented the brick code, and it only occurred with 2.1b (I'm pretty sure). And uh, I don't think the header thing is really that big a deal. It only takes like two seconds to do as opposed to finding a trustworthy place to download .CIAs and in turn wait minutes to hours for them to install. I'm surprised you didn't mention that Gateway doesn't perfectly patch signatures.

 

[Tomy Sakazaki]

I agree with most of your points. But here's my comment. I'm pretty sure you can't accidentally update sysNAND with Gateway. Even if both NANDs are linked, Gateway has NE ver failed to update specifically emuNAND. Or at least, not for me. Also, the brick code. I'm almost ALMOST certain that 100% of the time Gateway will only brick DSTWO+ and other clones. Yes, there were reports of users bricking with Gateway, but that was when they first implemented the brick code, and it only occurred with 2.1b (I'm pretty sure). And uh, I don't think the header thing is really that big a deal. It only takes like two seconds to do as opposed to finding a trustworthy place to download .CIAs and in turn wait minutes to hours for them to install. I'm surprised you didn't mention that Gateway doesn't perfectly patch signatures.

Yes, you can accidentally update sysNAND with gateway, and it's exactly the same way that anybody would update sysNAND while using CFW. They are:
Updating through eShop.
Accepting update nag after exiting the System Settings.
What may raise the risk of confusion, and due to it, update the sysNAND is the entrypoint (what you use to launch CFW, HBL and GW) , lets say that the user relies too much on menuhax and don't check properly if it actually acted to launch a emunand and accept an update nag.
It doesn't matter in this case if you use CFW or GW, if you isn't sure that you are on emunand and risk to update using the nag screen you are risked to update sysNAND instead.
And this must had happened a lot after the downgrade wave due to some new CFW/GW users without the necessary knowledge on how to properly update emuNAND.
Tl;dr The risk of updating sysNAND is the same for GW and CFW, and they happen due to human error.

 

[CreAtor135]

Yes, you can accidentally update sysNAND with gateway, and it's exactly the same way that anybody would update sysNAND while using CFW. They are:
Updating through eShop.
Accepting update nag after exiting the System Settings.
What may raise the risk of confusion, and due to it, update the sysNAND is the entrypoint (what you use to launch CFW, HBL and GW) , lets say that the user relies too much on menuhax and don't check properly if it actually acted to launch a emunand and accept an update nag.
It doesn't matter in this case if you use CFW or GW, if you isn't sure that you are on emunand and risk to update using the nag screen you are risked to update sysNAND instead.
And this must had happened a lot after the downgrade wave due to some new CFW/GW users without the necessary knowledge on how to properly update emuNAND.
Tl;dr The risk of updating sysNAND is the same for GW and CFW, and they happen due to human error.

I'll edit that part out then. I did say specifically for me, though.