Homebrew ARM9Loader -- Technical Details and Discussion

[joseole99]

I've seen a few posts about 128GB SD cards taking longer to boot A9LH, is this a regular occurrence, or isolated incidences?

I'm currently using a SanDisk Ultra 32GB micro SD on N3DS with A9LH and it boots in 9 seconds. The plan is to upgrade to a 128GB SanDisk micro SD, would it impact performance significantly?

Mine takes maybe 15 seconds? Never timed but but never felt like it was very long.

It takes 17.26 from power on to fully loaded menu with 70+ games.

 

[Classicgamer]

I've seen a few posts about 128GB SD cards taking longer to boot A9LH, is this a regular occurrence, or isolated incidences?

I'm currently using a SanDisk Ultra 32GB micro SD on N3DS with A9LH and it boots in 9 seconds. The plan is to upgrade to a 128GB SanDisk micro SD, would it impact performance significantly?

I'm 128gb sandisk booting into latest reinand emunand using a9lh with 190 cias installed (data management has 38 pages x 5 items a page LoL)

Takes 14 seconds to cold boot using a custom theme.

 

[GBHAKC75]

I've seen a few posts about 128GB SD cards taking longer to boot A9LH, is this a regular occurrence, or isolated incidences?

I'm currently using a SanDisk Ultra 32GB micro SD on N3DS with A9LH and it boots in 9 seconds. The plan is to upgrade to a 128GB SanDisk micro SD, would it impact performance significantly?

It seems to be recurrent. However 64GB would be enough for most situations, I hardly see why you would need 128GB...

 

[NekoMichi]

I did notice some unexpected patterns in boot times though. There are 3 test devices:
- O3DS with 16GB SanDisk Ultra micro SD (+mSD to SD adaptor) with 4 games installed (10GB free)
- N3DS with 32GB SanDisk Ultra micro SD with 24 games installed (3GB free)
- N3DS XL with 64GB SanDisk Ultra micro SD with 40+ games installed (16GB free)

The O3DS and N3DS XL boot A9LH about 1 second faster than the N3DS, despite the XL having much more games installed than the N3DS.

It seems to be recurrent. However 64GB would be enough for most situations, I hardly see why you would need 128GB...

64GB is *just* about enough for the .cias installed (Resident Evil Revelations and Xenoblade Chronicles being space hogs here). The 128GB card is on sale for a limited time and I'm planning on putting some ROM fullsets for old consoles on there plus leaving more space for future-proofing in case any large games are released in the eShop in the future.

Oh, and I plan on leaving NAND dumps on the SD card in case of emergency.

 

[Bobbery18]

You need to return to sysNAND after you have finished playing a GBA game for it to finish saving the game.

AHH thank you! I was having this issue too and thought it was just a bunch of bad injected CIAs or something. Glad I was wrong lol!

 

[GBHAKC75]

I did notice some unexpected patterns in boot times though. There are 3 test devices:
- O3DS with 16GB SanDisk Ultra micro SD (+mSD to SD adaptor) with 4 games installed (10GB free)
- N3DS with 32GB SanDisk Ultra micro SD with 24 games installed (3GB free)
- N3DS XL with 64GB SanDisk Ultra micro SD with 40+ games installed (16GB free)

The O3DS and N3DS XL boot A9LH about 1 second faster than the N3DS, despite the XL having much more games installed than the N3DS.

64GB is *just* about enough for the .cias installed (Resident Evil Revelations and Xenoblade Chronicles being space hogs here). The 128GB card is on sale for a limited time and I'm planning on putting some ROM fullsets for old consoles on there plus leaving more space for future-proofing in case any large games are released in the eShop in the future.

Oh, and I plan on leaving NAND dumps on the SD card in case of emergency.

You can remove the CIA files after installation. And AFAIK, Xenoblade is about 2GB, which is far from 64.

And you shouldn't leave NAND dumps on SD. If your SD crashes, they're lost. Also, for example, A9LH restores NAND.bin at the root of the SD without asking.

 

[NekoMichi]

You can remove the CIA files after installation. And AFAIK, Xenoblade is about 2GB, which is far from 64.

And you shouldn't leave NAND dumps on SD. If your SD crashes, they're lost. Also, for example, A9LH restores NAND.bin at the root of the SD without asking.

Yep, I've been deleting .cias after installation. It's the installed titles that take up so much space. As for NAND dumps, I keep multiple copies in several places just in case. It's just leaving one backup of the emuNAND on the SD in case emuNAND bricks, then I can use Decrypt9 on sysNAND to restore it.

 

[Ekaitz]

I read it before, there is a small issue with GBA games.
I did a test with LoZ: The Minish Cap. I boot the game, change the language to French, create a save file. I pressed the home button and confirmed to leave.
AuReiNand autobooted in Emunand, I relaunched the game: No more save file and the game was back to English.

Same things again, I left the game and this time I booted into sysnand (using AuReiNand), turned off the system.
Reboot to emunand, I launch the game, it's in French with the save file.

I've got linked nands and I installed the game only on emunand.
So, coming back to sysnand is mandatory to keep the save file. Do you think it is possible to find a workaround and keep my emunand without having to boot into sysnand every time I want to save the game?

 

[dark_samus3]

I read it before, there is a small issue with GBA games.
I did a test with LoZ: The Minish Cap. I boot the game, change the language to French, create a save file. I pressed the home button and confirmed to leave.
AuReiNand autobooted in Emunand, I relaunched the game: No more save file and the game was back to English.

Same things again, I left the game and this time I booted into sysnand (using AuReiNand), turned off the system.
Reboot to emunand, I launch the game, it's in French with the save file.

I've got linked nands and I installed the game only on emunand.
So, coming back to sysnand is mandatory to keep the save file. Do you think it is possible to find a workaround and keep my emunand without having to boot into sysnand every time I want to save the game?

It's possible to make a patch for it, but for the time being it's not gonna work.... if you wanna recover a save you can just boot into decrypt9 and use it to get the agbsave and inject into sysNAND and reboot I think, though don't quote me on that

 

[dark_samus3]

Well, plans have changed a lot for what to do, so far here's what we have

• recovery mode, this is a mode that's as minimal as it gets to reinstall stage 2 incase you screw yours up, or somehow power off during writing and stage 2 get's corrupted, a spare stage 2 payload will be located in NAND so you don't even need an SD card to use this, though the recovery will look for a file on the SD card before falling back to NAND
• recovery mode now doubles as a stage 2 updater, so that'll be integrated directly into your a9lh install once we get everything working
• to enter recovery mode, hold the home button and then power the system on, this ensures that no bootmanagers get interfered with and all other buttons are available for use with them

That's all for the moment, and not all of it has been integrated yet, stay tuned for more though

 

[urherenow]

Sounds awesome!

Edit: But... the falling back to nand part... how is this done when all of this happens before keys are even initted? Or do you know how to init the keys now? So... decrypt9 will be able to do ALL of its functions when booting from a9lh?

 

[DQScott95]

I read it before, there is a small issue with GBA games.
I did a test with LoZ: The Minish Cap. I boot the game, change the language to French, create a save file. I pressed the home button and confirmed to leave.
AuReiNand autobooted in Emunand, I relaunched the game: No more save file and the game was back to English.

Same things again, I left the game and this time I booted into sysnand (using AuReiNand), turned off the system.
Reboot to emunand, I launch the game, it's in French with the save file.

I've got linked nands and I installed the game only on emunand.
So, coming back to sysnand is mandatory to keep the save file. Do you think it is possible to find a workaround and keep my emunand without having to boot into sysnand every time I want to save the game?

Little tip to make it go faster if you didnt already know, just save the game then hold L (or whatever you have sysNAND boot set to) and press the power button. It will reboot immediately into sysNAND then you can reboot into emuNAND

 

[peteruk]

Well, plans have changed a lot for what to do, so far here's what we have

• recovery mode, this is a mode that's as minimal as it gets to reinstall stage 2 incase you screw yours up, or somehow power off during writing and stage 2 get's corrupted, a spare stage 2 payload will be located in NAND so you don't even need an SD card to use this, though the recovery will look for a file on the SD card before falling back to NAND
• recovery mode now doubles as a stage 2 updater, so that'll be integrated directly into your a9lh install once we get everything working
• to enter recovery mode, hold the home button and then power the system on, this ensures that no bootmanagers get interfered with and all other buttons are available for use with them

That's all for the moment, and not all of it has been integrated yet, stay tuned for more though

thank you for the update and all the great work you and your team do, long may it continue

 

[TheReturningVoid]

What's the proper method to update sysNAND with a9lh installed? I'm running AuReiNand, 9.2 sysNAND and 10.6 emuNAND.

 

[dark_samus3]

What's the proper method to update sysNAND with a9lh installed? I'm running AuReiNand, 9.2 sysNAND and 10.6 emuNAND.

you could switch you emuNAND and sysNAND (use decrypt9 to back up the CTRNAND partitions of both and swap them) or if you don't want to do that, just update directly from system settings, if you're using the latest AuReiNand that is

 

[AkGBA]

What's the proper method to update sysNAND with a9lh installed? I'm running AuReiNand, 9.2 sysNAND and 10.6 emuNAND.

Update or switch ? If switch, there at least two tutorials.
Edit : ninja'd

 

[Ekaitz]

Little tip to make it go faster if you didnt already know, just save the game then hold L (or whatever you have sysNAND boot set to) and press the power button. It will reboot immediately into sysNAND then you can reboot into emuNAND

Yes, that's what I do atm but I would enjoy a solution without having to manually boot sysnand.

It's possible to make a patch for it, but for the time being it's not gonna work.... if you wanna recover a save you can just boot into decrypt9 and use it to get the agbsave and inject into sysNAND and reboot I think, though don't quote me on that

The patch would have to be included into A9LH or into the CFW?
That is a small issue but it's a bit annoying. I may switch emunand and sysnand to solve the issue but I'm still unsure about it, mainly because it boots in nearly the same time (sys or emu) and my sysnand is really clean. (nothing was installed, ticket.db is clean.)

Btw, Recovery Mode is great.

 

[TheReturningVoid]

Swapped around the NANDs with no problem at all. Thanks for the tip guys!

 

[k8099]

Well, plans have changed a lot for what to do, so far here's what we have

• recovery mode, this is a mode that's as minimal as it gets to reinstall stage 2 incase you screw yours up, or somehow power off during writing and stage 2 get's corrupted, a spare stage 2 payload will be located in NAND so you don't even need an SD card to use this, though the recovery will look for a file on the SD card before falling back to NAND
• recovery mode now doubles as a stage 2 updater, so that'll be integrated directly into your a9lh install once we get everything working
• to enter recovery mode, hold the home button and then power the system on, this ensures that no bootmanagers get interfered with and all other buttons are available for use with them

That's all for the moment, and not all of it has been integrated yet, stay tuned for more though

Where can i get the recovery mode version now?
I need reinstall the a9hl or just updata stage 2 file?

 

[dark_samus3]

Where can i get the recovery mode version now?
I need reinstall the a9hl or just updata stage 2 file?

it's not available yet, notice the word plans, meaning not implemented yet, when it is I'll post about it here