Hacking Odd AceKard "Clone" Issue

DictatorZero

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Ok, so I have an odd issue. Both my wife and I purchased 2 acekards (acekard2i) in 2009 (and I cannot remember if we purchased them from the same place, but one of them does not exist any more and we chose our site from authorized dealers on acekard's site). The cards were working fine until I went to update mine to see if it would be compatible with the 3DS. At that point the card would not load, AKAIO states that the card is a fake, which is where the confusion began.

As far as I understand it clones of acekards did not start popping up until the beginning of this year. Upon inspecting the cards they seemed to be clones, base upon the stickers and cases. I'm a little less sure when looking at the PC boards themselves. One thing of note is externally on the front of the cards, 3 of them had a slight squareish bulge (from where one of the chips on the PCB is pushing up, one of the cards does not have this. I try loading up this one card that is different and AKAIO 1.8.7 loads up no problem. the PCBs are different between this one card and the others, but the other 3 don't look like any of the PCBs I've seen online; they appear to be of the verity that had the window (the first iterations), as the front sticker on the card is covering up a square cutout that a chip on the PCB is poking through ever so slightly.

So here is the issue, these as far as I can recall were all purchased from the same location, and if not 2 of them (the one that looks like a clone but is real and one of the ones that I thought was a clone and does not work) were purchased from the same location, which was a site recommended by the acekard site. What can I do to see if the other 3 cards are just the old style and just not working for some reason and if they are clones any idea what I can do to get legitimate ones?
 

jurassicplayer

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Did you check if they were HW44 or HW81 before updating ._.? (HW44 is the one with the big fat chip sticking out of the case under the sticker) IIRC there was some problems with trying to update HW44 AK2is...and I don't think it has been resolved yet (maybe :/...I haven't been checking lately).
 

s4mid4re

 
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Did you check if they were HW44 or HW81 before updating ._.? (HW44 is the one with the big fat chip sticking out of the case under the sticker) IIRC there was some problems with trying to update HW44 AK2is...and I don't think it has been resolved yet (maybe :/...I haven't been checking lately).
There's no fix for the HWID 44 ones yet.

But that's only an issue on the latest 1.4.3 dsi/2.0.3 3ds update iirc, so you'll be able to recover your bricked ak2i's by re-flashing your ak2i's to an older boot-strap (say, this one; there may be a newer one that works on HW44 though). Since your ak2i's are bricked, you'll have to swap the cart to update. I don't know if you have any other systems other than your (updated) dsi, but you'll most likely need a ds phat or lite to downgrade. Also, the updater will tell you which hardware ID your acekard 2i is (either HW4444 or HW8181) in order to check if it's one of the older ones or not.

Load the updater on one of your other working flashcarts. When the updater loads up, it gives you an option to swap carts. Without turning off, swap carts to your bricked acekard 2i and run the updater on the bricked ak2i. Do the same for the other one(s) that got bricked.

Not sure about acekard saying that it's a clone, but I think that was a bug with one of the akaio firmwares. update to akaio 1.8.8 and see if that solves.
 

DictatorZero

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I'm not entirely certain I understand what you are suggesting. I downloaded the updater, and put it on my MicroSD card and placed it into the working acekard and went through the installer, but it never game me the option to switch cards. What am I missing?
 

GeekyGuy

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I'm not entirely certain I understand what you are suggesting. I downloaded the updater, and put it on my MicroSD card and placed it into the working acekard and went through the installer, but it never game me the option to switch cards. What am I missing?

Are those the only two cards you have? What he seemed to be suggesting was, if you have another (third) working card, put the bootstrap (update) on it, load the update, and you should be given an option to switch cards, at which time you'll want to then insert one of the bricked cards in order to (hopefully) unbrick it.
 

DictatorZero

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Well I have a working cart and I tried loading the firmware on it and then I tried to swap it (both in a DSL and a DSi) but when I switch cards and hit B as the screen says nothing happens.
 

DictatorZero

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Upon further investigation on my part I found that the cards that were not working, were not "clones" per-say, but AceKard 2.1s with AceKard2i stickers on them...which sucks. I found this out when I loaded the last official firmware on the mSD card and checked the HWID...which was 80. Anyone got any suggestions on how to rectify this?
 

DictatorZero

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I would, but one site no longer exists and the other purchase was so long ago I don't have any sort of record handy in which to reference.
 

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