Misc How did smea know "how" to hack the 3ds ?

[Dathuss]

Hey all, I'm just curious how did smealum, in the first place, know what to do ?? Let me reformulate. I mean, cool, you got a way to execute arbitrary code, now how do you know what to execute ? As the 3ds runs on ARMv8, you can execute assembly code, but how did smea know, for example, how to open a file, call the keyboard handler, write to the nand... I know it's through syscalls, and looking at the source code of ctrulib and dissassembling myself some program code, the syntax for a syscall looks like this : get the syscall buffer, in the first element of said buffer, input a constant that represents the action of the syscall, then in the next elements, input the parameters, then call `swi 0x32`. But how did he know this ?? Did he just reverse engineer some game's source code, or through trial and error, or is the 3ds kernel similar to an open source kernel ? I'm curious.

 

[PewnyPL]

As far as syscalls go, Nintendo SDK's documentation likely was a huge help. Since devs need to use the syscalls, they have to be explained. And basically all 3DS hackers had access to it in one way or another.

 

[zfreeman]

A lot of documentation was provided by Yellows8.

https://gbatemp.net/threads/3ds-hack-we-hacked-it.339271/

https://web.archive.org/web/20160109163114/http://smealum.net/

 

[Dathuss]

As far as syscalls go, Nintendo SDK's documentation likely was a huge help. Since devs need to use the syscalls, they have to be explained. And basically all 3DS hackers had access to it in one way or another.

Oh I forgot about the SDK. It looks pretty obvious now.

 

[Dathuss]

A lot of documentation was provided by Yellows8.

https://gbatemp.net/threads/3ds-hack-we-hacked-it.339271/

https://web.archive.org/web/20160109163114/http://smealum.net/

Wow they really had some work to do though. I wonder what would've had happened without ninjhax.

 

[Kwyjor]

A lot of documentation was provided by Yellows8.

https://gbatemp.net/threads/3ds-hack-we-hacked-it.339271/

https://web.archive.org/web/20160109163114/http://smealum.net/

I also suggest: