Consoles and homebrews

[Vipera]

After discussing about it on IRC I decided to open a thread here. Hopefully there will be a respectful discussion.


I grew up in the NDS homebrew scene and I experienced A LOT of stuff being made. I used DSOrganize and Moonshell 1.70 as multimedia software, BeUp for MSN, SavSender to backup my saves, The SMS Center to send free SMS to my friends, DSWiki for Wikipedia, Biorhythm because flying biorhythm monster, IRCDS for IRC... there was a lot of stuff even without an app-store. Surely it was buggy as hell (BeUp was so shitty that I browser NDS Browser for MSN), but it was fun seeing how much you could expand a shitty console like a Nintendo DS. There are many emulators too, from Atari to the freaking DOS... awesome! And a lot of free games too like Pocket Physics (not really a game, but still fun), Brain Games or that Tower Defense game I forgot the name.

There was a lot of piracy on the DS, but also a lot of creativity going on to make the console as complete as possible.

When the PS3 got hacked people went apeshit because "OMG THINK ABOUT ALL THE HOMEBREWS!" because the console is very powerful and think about all the cool games and emulators and such! We got many games like..uhm... Pong, and Freecell, and rock paper scissors... ok, stuff that a NES could play. But what about the emulators? We got NES! And SNES! And Sega CD... disappointing. We were promised a lot of thing we didn't get due to the lack of interest.

The Nintendo 3DS has been out for more than 4 years and, thanks to Smea, we now get some kind of homebrew support. The 3DS comes with an internet browser, an audio player, youtube and the ability to store your games in a single SD card. All this while Android has taken over the world and cheap media players and handheld emulators are a thing. Developers are also more likely to sell their product anyway, no matter how shitty it is (looking at you MyNotebook).


Yet many people see the ability to have 3DS homebrews like a miracle. In all honesty, I don't think there will ever be anything cool due to these reasons. We will get our homebrews that worked back in the GBA era, maybe some shitty perv homebrew too (looking at you Sapphire 3DS hack...*sheds single tear*). I don't know, am I wrong?

 

[The Catboy]

I honestly wish there was more focus on the 3DS homebrew scene. Like there's much that can be done and it's not being done! Which is sad because the DS wasn't very power, yet there was tons of hombrew for it, same with the PSP, which is why I wish there more interest in 3DS homebrews. Even if it was ports of homebrews from other systems, it would still be nice to.
Also I love to see Moonshell come back.

 

[HaloEffect17]

Yes. I am really excited for upcoming 3DS homebrew. It was cool to see how we really expanded the DS's limited capabilities. Hopefully, we can do the same for the 3DS.

 

[Tom Bombadildo]

The homebrew scene sort of tanked as soon as things like smart phones and open source handhelds started to become a thing.

Homebrew doesn't seem as interesting on the 3DS compared to the DS because we can already do anything (homebrew wise) the 3DS can do on devices most people carry with them every day, their smart phones. Even cheapo trash ones can go around and emulate most consoles on the go. Practically the only real "pro" the 3DS might have over any average smartphone is the presence of physical buttons, but there are tons of controllers and clips that support pretty much all phones with a Bluetooth connection that makes the argument somewhat moot.

I mean, as a developer, would you rather wait 4 years for a handheld to be hacked so your game or app or whatever can be downloaded by a few hundred thousand people, or would you rather just develop your game and release it to the millions and millions of people with smartphones?

 

[migles]

psp was the best console for homebrew... it's great success was mainly because the console was a powerfull portable device before android was a thing.. i mean, at the time, developers who wanted to make portable apps, didn't had much a choise, psp was a great choise to develop to..
nowadays if you want to make an app or program, you can easily do it on an android device and use ot for lots of stuff
there is no really reason to build stuff for a weak console like the 3ds... since you can easily build on a tablet\phone and get much more power out of it, also much higher audience...
we will see some emulators and one app here and then, but not anything like the psp had...

when i had the psp, i had seen really neat stuff, like calendars, organizers, file explorers, calculators, there was built so many "apps" for it it even had irc msn and skype, even if its hard to use because the number of buttons it has...
nowadays you can do everything on a phone, so there is no real reason to get theese things on a 3ds, making them impractical..
i used my psp on school for several reasons... specially calculator, tv remote...

i can see the 3ds get some emulators and some stuff but there is no interest on a weak device... when there are millions of android devices available...

 

[HaloEffect17]

psp was the best console for homebrew...

Especially having those "signed" emulators. I could run GBA and SNES with no CFW.

 

[migles]

Especially having those "signed" emulators. I could run GBA and SNES with no CFW.

at it's last stage yes... i got on psp modding not really on the beggining but it was still early.. (a lot before the 2000 was released) i waited several months until someone found an exploitable game, because i made the mistake of update the console... much later someone found out you could exploit the battery serial to trick the console into reading from the memory card (pandora battery)
just some years later people found how to sign them..

edit: forgot to mention, dark alex was a good damn hacker...

 

[DinohScene]

360 homebrew scene is even more shittier.
Homebrew for consoles/handhelds these days come from diehard fans, not every day users anymore.

 

[Vipera]

Yet I keep reading about people excited for them. I just don't know what could anybody possibly make on 3ds as home brew that he cannot sell, or emulators that aren't the usual that a GBA can emulate.

 

[DanTheManMS]

I was in highschool from 2004-2008 (so right when the DS was launched and tons of kids at school had one) and after I finally upgraded from my GBA + Flash2Advance Ultra combo, the DS became my daily driver. It was insane how much awesome homebrew people managed to create for the system. As others said, smart phones did not really exist yet (at least it wasn't until the iPhone in 2007 that they became mainstream enough) so the DS was still actually more capable than most people's flip-phones. It was always fun showing people how I turned this weak little 66-MHz machine with a mere 4 MB of RAM into a full-fledged media player, web browser, chatting client, etc. It was my daily MP3 player for years via Moonshell. There's several original Game Boy games I only managed to finally finish on the DS because of Lameboy's "speed-up" button to help power through some grinding stages. I read the last two Harry Potter books on my DS using a text reader with white text on a black background and nice subpixel anti-aliasing to make it easy on the eyes. I used DSLinux to stream Internet radio, while browsing the web, while typing up some notes in VI or NANO (I still maintain that DSLinux has the best homebrew keyboard out there). Even made a call or two with SVSIP just for grins although it hardly worked.

Sure the PSP could do all that and more, with a bigger screen and faster processor and an actual filesystem built into the device rather than the whole mess with DLDI patching, but I still have a very special place in my heart for the DS and all the years I spent messing with it. It sucks that almost all the tools that enabled DS homebrew (minus the GBAMP v2 I suppose) also allowed for such easy piracy, which forced Nintendo to step up their security to the point we're at now. Especially with everyone having smartphones nowadays, the sort of scene we saw will likely not happen again.