Hacking Action Replay/Trainer Toolkit Reverse Engineering

[gudenau]

I would like to figure out how the action replay and trainer toolkit works, mainly to turn the trainer toolkit into a development tool and to make an open version of the software for the toolkit.

Anyone got some info on where to start or on the devices themselves?

Any help is welcomed, I plan on making the driver's in C and the rest in Java; if someone could work on a Mac version when I get something working that would be great.

 

[gudenau]

Bump since it has been 12 hours.

 

[atkfromabove]

I was just starting down the road of doing some work on the hardware itself. I have taken apart the casing and found that there is a top chip and and actel chip. It seems like the tsop chip contains the firmware, game database, and AR codes and is in charge of passing the info to the actel chip. The actel chip is what interacts with the DS cartridge modifying the hex bits for the particular game to activate the cheats.

I found on the action replay board there are pinouts for both chips and have started to try and trace the routes. Unfortunately I do not have the right equipment to determine what each pin actually does in regards to data lines, clock, ground, etc.

Since I don't have a NDS/Lite to dump my Action Replay DSi firmware I thought I'd try to dump it manually with a hard mod on the pinouts.

Front:

Spoiler

Back:

Spoiler

I'm not sure if you were wanting to know more about the hardware or software but I figured it doesn't hurt to share. I have looked a bit into the software as well as the xml game code database.

 

[atkfromabove]

I found these looking through some info out there.

First PDF is a manual. The second was a tutorial written by cracker.

 

[gudenau]

I was just starting down the road of doing some work on the hardware itself. I have taken apart the casing and found that there is a top chip and and actel chip. It seems like the tsop chip contains the firmware, game database, and AR codes and is in charge of passing the info to the actel chip. The actel chip is what interacts with the DS cartridge modifying the hex bits for the particular game to activate the cheats.

I found on the action replay board there are pinouts for both chips and have started to try and trace the routes. Unfortunately I do not have the right equipment to determine what each pin actually does in regards to data lines, clock, ground, etc.

Since I don't have a NDS/Lite to dump my Action Replay DSi firmware I thought I'd try to dump it manually with a hard mod on the pinouts.

Front:

Spoiler

Back:

Spoiler

I'm not sure if you were wanting to know more about the hardware or software but I figured it doesn't hurt to share. I have looked a bit into the software as well as the xml game code database.

That's the wrong version unfortunately.

 

[atkfromabove]

That's the wrong version unfortunately.

Ya, I didn't realize till after my first post that the trainer was a different card than what I was thinking.

 

[gudenau]

Ya, I didn't realize till after my first post that the trainer was a different card than what I was thinking.

That and it only works wth the original AR. :-/