Homebrew can I turn ds games into dsiware cias?

dubbz82

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This is an option for a lot of people, however a few things should be noted - 1. Some countries out there have plainly absurd import costs that would push that 13 dollar ds flashcart from a reputable reseller upwards to more like 40 dollars (Brazil in particular comes to mind) and also, depending on where they're shipping from and to, there's a reasonable chance that they could get caught up in customs. 2. ebay is about the last place I'd recommend buying from, as reputable sellers likely won't risk listing a ds cart (or any other rom cart for that matter) as it's in violation of ebay policy, and potentially throwing their selling privileges on the line, or at bare minimum, there's a pretty reasonable chance that the auction will be pulled before bidding ends. For the moment, I'd tend to agree that it's still the -BEST- option, but I'd personally be all for the idea of cutting out the middleman, and having everything run off the SD card if it's eventually a viable possibility.
 

dpad_5678

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A flashcart isn't downloadable...
Wat. What's wrong with spending a little bit of money?
upload_2016-1-22_20-1-29.png
 

Apache Thunder

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Maybe some folks don't want to feed money to the flashcart industry.

Either way it would be nice to be able to run DS games without a flashcart. But not likely to happen. DS titles partly use Arm7 which I believe is not accessible when in CTR mode. So it would be very difficult if not impossible to emulate or virtualize a DS in a sandboxed app in 3DS mode.

The best case scenario is that someone makes a sig patch of TWL_FIRM so that you can build custom DSi SRLs. Then through that SRL you some how manage to make a DSi mode Sandbox application that can play DS games while in DSi mode. That assumes there's enough left over power in DSi mode to emulate/redirect save game code in DS games as they were originally programmed to save to a physical chip on a cartridge. Flashcarts did this too to allow saving to a file on MicroSD (so perhaps it may help to reverse how that works to see if you can translate that into something that may work from DSi mode)

Then maybe. But in all likely hood you may not be able to properly emulate/fix the save game issue thus you'd either have to break save game functionality entirely, or pre-patch every game you want to run in this DSi sandboxed environment you setup. You could also pre-patch them and install them as individual SRLs if TWL_FIRM sig patches become a thing. But installing DS games to TWLN would mean you'd run out of space quickly. There's not a lot of space allocated to TWL NAND where all DSiWare gets installed. Some games like most of the pokemon games are too large to even fit a single one of them onto TWLN partition.

There just isn't enough interest in doing something like this so it's unlikely to happen. :(
 
Last edited by Apache Thunder,

Halvorsen

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So lol? I have the DSi Browsr on my N3DS's for some reason.
Doesn't mean we can injct any NDS game we want into a DSiWare CIA.
Kindof.
We could possibly load up Nintendo DSi System Menu and hack the firmware to pull off a Sky3DS and load roms off the card, and showing it in the GCS.
 

dpad_5678

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Kindof.
We could possibly load up Nintendo DSi System Menu and hack the firmware to pull off a Sky3DS and load roms off the card, and showing it in the GCS.
The hardware in the Sky3DS BB/+ card is meant to emulate 3DS game carts. DS and 3DS carts' hardwar are/is very different.
Also, we don't know the encryption / have the source code of the Sky3DS firmware.
 

Apache Thunder

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Teach me your knowledge.

The trick is to copy over files from a DSi NAND dump into TWLN partition. There's a lot of things the 3DS got rid of that DSi NAND used to have. (like tickets and misc other things that are now stored on CTR NAND). There's a few files it needs for it to boot DSi System Settings correctly. I didn't narrow down which files it needs exactly. I just copied over all the missing files that TWLN lacked.

EDIT: Also I did try to boot DSi Home Menu (Goes by "Launcher"). But likely won't work without modification because of hardware/software differences in how the 3DS setups up TWL mode compared to a real DSi, so no DSi Home Menu for now. :(

There's a DSi launcher SRL of some kind stored in TWL_FIRM since 3DBrew mentions that it's mapped to memory by TWL's process9. Good luck hunting that down and swapping it out. :P
 
Last edited by Apache Thunder,

Halvorsen

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The hardware in the Sky3DS BB/+ card is meant to emulate 3DS game carts. DS and 3DS carts' hardwar are/is very different.
Also, we don't know the encryption / have the source code of the Sky3DS firmware.
Not literally USE Sky3DS...

--------------------- MERGED ---------------------------

The trick is to copy over files from a DSi NAND dump into TWLN partition. There's a lot of things the 3DS got rid of that DSi NAND used to have. (like tickets and misc other things that are now stored on CTR NAND). There's a few files it needs for it to boot DSi System Settings correctly. I didn't narrow down which files it needs exactly. I just copied over all the missing files that TWLN lacked.
Can you, by extension, load up the Menu?
 

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