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Hardware Mystery flashcart used by Dora bootleg....

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Apache Thunder

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Looking to indentify what flashcart this is. I had found a Dora the Explorer saves the snow princess DS game bootleg. It's actually the second one I've come across but unlike the first one it is not an N-Card but some other form of nand based flashcart I've never seen before. Rom dumps show 2 other roms present besides Dora. YJLoader and YJMenu. The primary rom is YJLoader. This card uses the YJYJ game code. Does have Dora icon flashed to it to make it look like the Dora game. Seems to be boot up pretty quick. Probably a bit faster then the N-Card version did.

PXL_20240521_160032669.jpgPXL_20240521_160049466.jpg

Identified the nand chip as a Hynix 4gbit (512MB) NAND in TSOP 48 package. Unlike N-Card this uses a SPI based chip for save storage just like retail cards and doesn't require a battery.

Looking to find any info on this thing. It seems pretty ancient and the yjmenu rom I found imbedded with the other rom seems to indicate this has a kernel menu of some sorts that is currently disabled. (maybe only appears if more then one game is flashed to this cart).

Unlike N-Card this does show up on 3DS Home Menu but since it's not presenting a 1:1 rom of the target game like my New Super Mario Bros bootleg, it will fail DS Cart White list checks on unmodded consoles.

Will boot fine on soft modded DSi but on 3DS the primary rom uses a arm7 entrypoint in the 0x03xxxx range and thus TWL_FIRM will not boot it. (shows error has occured screen).

This card is compatible with NTR Launcher though. Had no issues booting it with that.
 
Last edited by Apache Thunder,
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Aren't all flashcarts using micro sd for storage ? Or is this like a built in bootleg ? First time hearing about these
 
Some older flash carts used nand for storage and do not have any form of removable storage. N-Cards are a notable example. The M3 G6 and Acekard R.P.G are other carts that have nand storage. Though Acekard RPG is unique in that it has both nand and a MicroSD slot.

Most post R4 era cards moved away from this and are almost all MicroSD these days.
 
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Apache Thunder said:
Rom dumps show 2 other roms present besides Dora. YJLoader and YJMenu. The primary rom is YJLoader. This card uses the YJYJ game code.
Click to expand...
YJLoader sounds very similar to something that I've heard before. The 'YJ' name reminds me of the encryption system used by Sintax for encrypting their bootleg GBA games that used the same terrible game engine, such as Fighter Sonic and even a Ninja Turtles game. Not sure how different this would be to the GBA one, however, but I'm certainly interested.
 
Last edited by SylverReZ,
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Update: I've just discovered that these are undumpable, until now...

I recently purchased a Harry Potter DS game, which at first I believed was to be an N-Card flashcart. It wasn't until I opened it, though, that I discovered that it used the same circuit board as the Dora cart as OP shows. The NAND flash is manufactured by Hynix and it has a capacity of 1 GBit, which is roughly more than the original ROM's 64 MB (128 MB, to be exact). GodMode9 and NDS Backup Tool were unable to create a full dump; as a result, the file size appears as 256 KB rather than the full dump.

All was not lost, however. Thanks to @Apache Thunder, he was able to compile a build of NDS Backup Tool for me, which forces the resulting ROM size as 256MB to see if it would make any difference, and surprisingly, it actually worked, and I was able to see the dump in its entirety.

Funniest part about all of this, I can see why my cart wouldn't dump using the usual backup utils, the capacity flag is set to '1' in 0x14 (hex) which seemingly equates to 256KB, perhaps as a cheapskate anti-piracy measure heh.

Screenshot_2024-10-13_14-58-33.png
 
Last edited by SylverReZ,
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This looks intentional because you can see this is not the game being presented by this cart. It says YJLOADER. That means it's a flashcart of sorts.
 
The kernel/firmware rom is only using the 256KB area really....so I don't think it's a measure to intentionally prevent dumping. I'm not sure why they would care if you were able to dump the game they used or not. :P

I'm thinking these YJLoader carts might be the "NDS 1:1" cart that was shown as one of the products on the original dsgba website. Can't really look it up now though due to internat archive being down at the moment. :(

Though that mystery NDS 1:1 cart might also be the style carts my NSMB bootleg are using....
 
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A little small update. It uses some strange address mirroring at unused parts of the ROM, and that the YJ loader patches those in memory. I guess that's why the game wouldn't properly work with melonDS or NO$GBA, unless I properly patch the necessary bytes from the original to make it somewhat playable.
 
Last edited by SylverReZ,
SylverReZ said:
There were bootlegs that did use NAND flash, primarily DS Linker/N-Card flashcarts for example.
Click to expand...

Hey so I've got my hand on a ds linker card with it's writer adapter, so whenever I try to load into my linker card on ds lite or dsi, it just gets stuck, on the dsi it gives white screen, so I was wondering if you could help me out to fix this card, I've connected the card to the pc & backed up the files, now I want to know like where to download it's firmware & how to install it freshly
 

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Onepunchbruh said:
Hey so I've got my hand on a ds linker card with it's writer adapter, so whenever I try to load into my linker card on ds lite or dsi, it just gets stuck, on the dsi it gives white screen, so I was wondering if you could help me out to fix this card, I've connected the card to the pc & backed up the files, now I want to know like where to download it's firmware & how to install it freshly
Click to expand...
If you have a DSi, it needs to be modded so that you can only boot it with TWiLight Menu++ and if I recall maybe Unlaunch as well. Older DS flashcarts like these are blacklisted with the later systems. On the DS fat and lite systems, it'll boot no problems.

Here's the setup guide for doing a complete re-installation of the flashcart: https://sanrax.github.io/flashcart-guides/cart-guides/ncard/
 
Last edited by SylverReZ,
SylverReZ said:
If you have a DSi, it needs to be modded so that you can only boot it with TWiLight Menu++ and if I recall maybe Unlaunch as well. Older DS flashcarts like these are blacklisted with the later systems. On the DS fat and lite systems, it'll boot no problems.

Here's the setup guide for doing a complete re-installation of the flashcart: https://nds.flashcarts.net/card/ncard
Click to expand...
Whenever I run it on my ds lite or fat ds, it just gets stuck at the menu screen, that's why I was thinking of reinstalling the flashcart

Below is the image of cart that I have
 

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Onepunchbruh said:
Whenever I run it on my ds lite or fat ds, it just gets stuck at the menu screen, that's why I was thinking of reinstalling the flashcart
Click to expand...
I know what cart you have. To me, with the screenshots that you have provided, there's nothing wrong with it on a DS fat or lite system. If games don't run, or if at times the cartridge doesn't boot, then the possibility that the NAND is corrupted somewhat would need a clean format. Feel free to elaborate if I get something wrong.
 
SylverReZ said:
I know what cart you have. To me, with the screenshots that you have provided, there's nothing wrong with it on a DS fat or lite system. If games don't run, or if at times the cartridge doesn't boot, then the possibility that the NAND is corrupted somewhat would need a clean format. Feel free to elaborate if I get something wrong.
Click to expand...
It goes into the menu & then stops working like pressing all the buttons do nothing for it, So that's why I'm thinking of redoing the installation, this cart is with a purple adapter that you put the cart in & then connect to pc to move files init, it doesn't have a gba writer for slot 2, so the installation guide you gave doesn't work on this one, I'm also confused like where the get the files for it to install, right now what I did was booting the cart on ds lite & the pressing select+start to go into recovery mode & now I'm doing the full format but after this I need the files to install to or put it on the flast cart to install, is there any guide for this specific cart?
 

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SylverReZ said:
Oops, was supposed to post this actually. https://sanrax.github.io/flashcart-guides/cart-guides/ncard/

Mistakenly added the kernel download, not the actual instructions. The DS Linker is the exact same as the N-Card but was relabelled by different companies (including NeoFlash with the MK5).
Click to expand...
https://selloffaccessories.wordpress.com/2008/05/04/ds-linker-release-two-packpage/

can you check the link, the ds linker cart that I have is one with the purple usb adapter, I think the guide you're sharing with is the one at the bottom with the usb cable & gba slot 2 writer that's why I was getting confused with the guide, like how do I connect the cart to pc & ds lite at the same time, with the cart I have it's impossible to do that, so check if there's a guide for the linker cart that I have

Update:
ummm so after the format it asked for the xmenu.dat file, so I just copied xmenu.dat file & 1 game from the backup & now it's working fine, anyways thanks for the help.. :)
 

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