ROM Hack DSiWare ROM Hacking Thread (for signature-patched TWL_FIRM)

[I pwned U!]

Sorry for the bump... But I feel it is justified with the recent developments in the DSi scene. Now that DSiWare loading in the form of a .nds file is possible on the DSi with unlaunch 0.9 and DSiMenu++. I tried to romhack a DSiWare title as well with no success. So I started looking around and found this thread. Has any progress been made on the digest sector hash table patching? Has anyone succeeded, and would it be possible for a tool te be created to automate this process at some point?

I just noticed that a ROM hack was made a few years ago, but the creator had to fix the hashes manually.

Perhaps @redunka can shed some light on the process for that game...

 

[redunka]

Yeah, I'm afraid that what I was doing for that hack, may not be really suitable for any serious project…
The way was really hacky, like actually splitting the data into sectors and blocks, and calculating hashes for each piece.
While that process can be automated, it's still not a good idea, as it may be quite slow and dangerous for HDD.

Actually, there was another DSiWare ROM hack released last December (the patch is here), by another guy.
Though I haven't asked him myself, I heard that he used a custom build of Tinke, but I'm not sure if he wants to share it.
He never uploaded it publicly, as far as I know, and he hasn't pushed the changes to his fork on GitHub either yet.

I'd really love to see proper tools for DSiWare ROM hacking myself.
My hack was a small and simple by itself (I probably wouldn't even try otherwise), it didn't deserve a thread on its own.
Just wanted to show it as a PoC, to bring more attention to DSiWare ROM hacking in general, but it kinda didn't work. :V

 

[redunka]

I apologize for this necrobump (and for double posting), but I figured that it would be justified, as I have some good news.

MetLob, the guy that I mentioned in my previous post above, has finally pushed those changes to his fork of Tinke, and also made a pull request to the original repo as well.

The pull request link has a test build, if anyone's interested.

 

[whywhy2]

i thought i'd able to export and import animated dsiware icon with the new fork but no it's still a static icon and can only save it.
well it works for editing the .loctext file in shantae risky's revenge (eur) with built in hex editor and i dont know how to edit the graphics. also metlob's fork only works in x64 windows if anyone wanna know

 

[redunka]

i thought i'd able to export and import animated dsiware icon with the new fork but no it's still a static icon and can only save it.
well it works for editing the .loctext file in shantae risky's revenge (eur) with built in hex editor and i dont know how to edit the graphics. also metlob's fork only works in x64 windows if anyone wanna know

There's another tool that can be used to edit animated icons:
https://gbatemp.net/threads/release-messanimdsico-simple-nintendo-ds-icon-editor.440178/
Also, I compiled the x86 version, but I can't test it, as the only x86 "PC" I have access to right now is a VM running WinXP (which is not supported by .NET Framework 4.5).

Edit: the x86 build is updated with latest commit.

 

[whywhy2]

Wow thank you so much for the icon editor, i should've search more for the tool.
and your compiled x86 version works on my windows 7, but how do you compile it though? i thought there's no source code for the dsi tinke fork.

 

[redunka]

Wow thank you so much for the icon editor, i should've search more for the tool.
and your compiled x86 version works on my windows 7, but how do you compile it though? i thought there's no source code for the dsi tinke fork.

Glad to know that it works.

As for the source code, the first link in my previous post is for MetLob's GitHub, the DSi changes are in the "DSi" branch:
https://github.com/MetLob/tinke/tree/DSi
If you have Git installed, you can clone the repo like this:

git clone --recursive https://github.com/MetLob/tinke.git -b DSi

Then just run "compile.bat" and answer the prompts to configure the build.
You must have .NET Framework 4.5 installed for this to work.

 

[whywhy2]

thank you so much for the fast reply and telling me how to build it with git, you really help me out for this.

 

[banjo2]

I've been looking for a thread like this for a while. I'm trying to modify the web browser (I have my reasons) and couldn't figure out why a literal string change in a hex editor wasn't working. This explained a lot, and I hope we'll be able to modify DSiWare easily soon

 

[banjo2]

Thanks to a link @Robz8 posted here, I was able to achieve my goal!

(If you can't tell, what I've done here is change the default background when viewing an image file from white to black. It's a small change, but it's definitely progress!)

I'm not sure how long that tool has been around, but, thank you for indirectly bringing it to my attention