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Homebrew DS(i) Mode hacking progress thread

  • Thread starter Thread starter Billy Acuña
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Apache Thunder said:
Arm7 not accessible from CTR mode. Arm7 is important for TWL software and it uses memory shared by Arm9. This obviously means you can't use it at all while in CTR mode. (because Arm9 only runs one process and that's Process9).

So you'd have to translate a lot of TWL instructions to work on Arm11 where CTR mode software work on. Good luck with that. :P
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Reverse engineering xD
 
Hiccup said:
It would also be interesting to see how the only downloadable DS game (something from Advance Wars, as a Club Nintendo prize in Japan only) was done. The most widely accepted theory is that the game (which originally wasn't dual mode) was recompiled for DSi!
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yes i have the game legitly on my n3ds, it's a dsiware game :) not normal ds.
 
I know I'm a couple (okay, a bunch) of pages late, but the reason that the failed attempts at running flash cart firmware in dsi mode failed are likely because there was no hardware detected for said card...this never stood a snowball's chance in...yeah, it wasn't gonna work.
 
dubbz82 said:
I know I'm a couple (okay, a bunch) of pages late, but the reason that the failed attempts at running flash cart firmware in dsi mode failed are likely because there was no hardware detected for said card...this never stood a snowball's chance in...yeah, it wasn't gonna work.
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Yeah, I was reading through that and just shaking my head the whole time
 
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tivu100 said:
Is it possible(/easier) to find a way to convert DS games to DSiware? Genuine question coming from a person who know nothing.
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no they are quite different unfortunately. dsi has new/different processors etc
and especially when we don't have any source for the game lol
 
tivu100 said:
Is it possible(/easier) to find a way to convert DS games to DSiware? Genuine question coming from a person who know nothing.
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Not really, no. DSiWare is written to access the SD card specifically, and DS games access hardware registers to read the game cartridge. Redirecting that would be a huge pain, and let's not forget that TWL_NAND (the partition of sys/emuNAND that stores DSiWare) isn't very big, maybe like 150MB or so. You could fit maybe one or two very small retail DS titles on there, if the register stuff wasn't a problem. DSiWare tends to be a lot smaller.
 
I'm pretty sure DSiWare has access to Slot-1. (or at least the functionality is probably there for it). But no app or game was ever made that had SD and Slot-1 access at the same time. If sig checks are patched out on TWL_FIRM it may be possible to hack one to have access to both.
 
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Apache Thunder said:
I'm pretty sure DSiWare has access to Slot-1. (or at least the functionality is probably there for it). But no app or game was ever made that had SD and Slot-1 access at the same time. If sig checks are patched out on TWL_FIRM it may be possible to hack one to have access to both.
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I remember the devs saying on #dsidev a long time ago that there are actually three hardware access possibilities in DSi Mode. DSi Menu had access to everything. When a DSi Mode capable cart was launched, SD/NAND access were turned off, and when a DSiWare was launched, Slot-1 access was turned off. And this needs a (soft or hard) reboot to undo, as it couldn't be reversed in software.

Of course, I'm sure that a TWL_FIRM patch could sort this out.
 
Last edited by Aurora Wright,
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Aurora Wright said:
I remember the devs saying on #dsidev a long time ago that there are actually three hardware access possibilities in DSi Mode. DSi Menu had access to everything. When a DSi Mode capable cart was launched, SD/NAND access were turned off, and when a DSiWare was launched, Slot-1 access was turned off. And this needs a (soft or hard) reboot to undo, as it couldn't be reversed in software.

Of course, I'm sure that a TWL_FIRM patch could sort this out.
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That's what I was talkig about before -_-
 
Billy Acuña said:
That's what I was talkig about before -_-
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I think you didn't get what I just said :P
Sure, it could be made that carts could access NAND and SD, and DSiWare could access slot-1. I guess it would just be a matter of patching the code that turns off access.
But this has nothing to do with what I said earlier. I'll try to say it as clearly as I can. When you launch an ARM9 code binary and an ARM7 code binary from a DS game from the SD card, the ARM9 code tries to read things (game files) from the gamecard. And *every game* has its own code (its a whole different software). ARM9 code can't even access the SD card in DSi mode (it's the ARM7 which can). And in DSi mode, nothing runs on top of games. When you launch that game's ARM9 & ARM7 binary, it's just those that are running. Can you see how this is really improbable? It would need serious effort for each game, to write code to redirect the gamecard reads in the ARM9 to some other code put in the ARM7, which reads from SD. Also, all the game bugs (crashes, misbehaviors, etc.) that would arise from the faster CPU would need to be found and fixed with reverse engineering. As we don't have the source code for the games.
 
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haipro2001 said:
dsiware cia are different from 3ds cia. Any one bricked yet? atleast i have nand dump
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Power failure during installing dsiware should probably just corrupt the tite.
I can't imagine it'd brick the unit easily, as the eshop also writes dsiware to nand.
 
It's a shame that we can't run dsiware strictly in emunand...if we could, that might at least open the possibility of expanding the partition a bit to give us more room to work with.
 
dubbz82 said:
It's a shame that we can't run dsiware strictly in emunand...if we could, that might at least open the possibility of expanding the partition a bit to give us more room to work with.
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Yeah, why must we isntall GBA/DSiWare titles on our sysNAND? Do those type of games technically boot into sysNAND when playing them?
Just something I've been curious about for a while.
 
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