Homebrew ARM9Loader -- Technical Details and Discussion

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Yeah waiting on that nand restore stuff. Got no games to update to 4.x or higher with, so I have no way out of 2.x once I downgrade it. :(

I'm gonna go the risky route of getting a9l setup without a functional nand mod. :P

There are some people working on an emuNAND solution in #Cakey as well, so testing the downgrade should be a lot safer in a few day(s)/week(s), once it's out. We obviously still can't get OTP from it, but if you have it booting in emuNAND, it should be safe to flash to sysNAND.
 
I already downgraded emunand to 2.1 and confirmed the FIRM partitions are good. I'm 99% sure it won't brick when I flash it to sysnand. I just haven't done it yet since I'll be stuck on 2.1 once I flash it.

I dumped my 9.2 sysnand, manually "reset" it by removing system save data and movable.sed (it generates a new one when you delete the file. I did this instead of system format since I had an NNID linked to it and didn't want to break NNID on emunand afterwords. :P ). So I had a factory reset 9.2 dump. I booted that from emunand fixed title database and installed sysupdater CIA. (I had devmenu installed to NAND, so it survived the system reset. :D ).

This gives me a nice clean 9.2 emunand for the most stable environment possible.


I then downgraded it. It installed all the titles (excluding the TWL titles) fine and rebooted. Of coarse at the moment emunand is no longer bootable after that. Need a emunand patched 2.1 firm to boot a 2.1 emunand correctly. (newer firms won't boot a 2.1 emunand since all CFWs use much newer firms to boot emunand). But I compared the FIRM partitions and confirmed they were updated correctly. So I'm really sure it won't brick when I flash this. :P
 
Last edited by Apache Thunder,
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Anyone have photos or youtube videos of this arm9loaderhax in action? I want to see for myself if it's worth risking a brick to get it
 
Anyone have photos or youtube videos of this arm9loaderhax in action? I want to see for myself if it's worth risking a brick to get it

Just give it another week or two for the safest possible methods to come out. They're working on getting emuNAND to boot 2.x so your downgraded NAND can be tested easier (then you'd just flash emuNAND to sysNAND), as well as a solution to restore a sysNAND dump to your sysNAND from the 2.x browser (and cubic ninja), so you can get back to 9.x afterward. It'll be more or less as easy as it gets once those two solutions are out.
 
Sounds great :yay3ds:, also If I do setup arm9loaderhax, how would I dual boot gateway and rxtools?
 
Sounds great :yay3ds:, also If I do setup arm9loaderhax, how would I dual boot gateway and rxtools?

By chucking Gateway out the window. But to be more serious, you'd probably have to wait for some sort of a boot manager or boot menu payload to be released. For now people are just directly booting into CFW using it, with no pretty options or menus yet, and Reinand is the only public CFW that I'm aware of that supports booting from A9LH right now, so you'll have to wait on Gateway and/or RxTools to do their thing and bring it over.
 
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Gateway making an arm9loaderhax payload??? HAHAHAHAHAHAA. You say funny things. There's no way in hell they'd make one. :P

Weirder things have happened. :P

But yeah, they have mountains of other features to get to first. It took them forever to release a 3dsx file as it is..
 
Umm you wouldn't need anything ever... a9lh is always latest firm and unpatchable. plus you can run anything on boot, games anything. Plus access HBL, d9, you think it, it can be ran. no need for GW or CFW, or even HBL really.
 
Umm you wouldn't need anything ever... a9lh is always latest firm and unpatchable. plus you can run anything on boot, games anything. Plus access HBL, d9, you think it, it can be ran. no need for GW or CFW, or even HBL really.

You're saying we can run/install any cia games, and homebrew cias on sysnand?
 
Last edited by cooroxd,
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There's still at least one valid use-case for having an emuNAND instead of booting into a CFW sysNAND all the time, wear and tear on the NAND memory. I'd rather put more wear and tear on a cheap SD card. There's also the fact that having multiple emuNANDs (whether it's on one SD card or multiple) lets you have as many games as you could possibly want installed, space permitting.
 
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Umm you wouldn't need anything ever... a9lh is always latest firm and unpatchable. plus you can run anything on boot, games anything. Plus access HBL, d9, you think it, it can be ran. no need for GW or CFW, or even HBL really.
Unless you enjoy running 3DS games as a .3ds file*
 
You're saying we can run/install any cia games, and homebrew cias on sysnand?
You already *can* do this. It's just not recommended to do so because messing with sysnand more than you need to can be seen as a risk for causing bricks, you can't update sysnand beyond 9.2 without losing your hacks, and because there hasn't been any way to coldboot directly into a patched/CFW'd sysnand environment. A9LH solves all of those problems nicely.
 
Last edited by FenrirWolf,

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