Homebrew DS(i) Mode hacking progress thread

  • Thread starter Thread starter Billy Acuña
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You see, the problem here is that we need people with actual knowledge.
The one's who actually want to figure this out and give a shit, are the one's who don't know how anything works. (Like myself.)
The only information we have is, "it's possible, but the people with knowledge are too lazy to work on this, and simply tell you to buy a flashcart because it's cheap".
Err... what makes you think the people saying "get a flashcard" were knowledgeable?
 
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I'm guessing hacking dsi mode on 3ds would be easier to do then hacking a actual dsi system or is there just no interest in the dsi system?
 
Err... what makes you think the people saying "get a flashcard" were knowledgeable?
Well, that phrase keeps on being stated by a lot of people. I'm still new to this forum, so I don't exactly know who's knowledgeable and who isn't.
But if it's being stated a lot, then it's safe to say that it's actually possible to do something like this.

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I'm guessing hacking dsi mode on 3ds would be easier to do then hacking a actual dsi system or is there just no interest in the dsi system?
I'm surprised the DSI didn't have any major strides in its day.
 
Last edited by Supster131,
The idea is loading DS roms skipping the TWLCard. We have TWLCard (the only current way to play DS backups, but only works with retail games and flashcards) and TWL_FIRM (which at the moment only runs DSiWare, and there is a sig patch to run pirated cias, but no homebrews, no DS games converted to cia), both stored on the ARM9. If we get a way to skip both TWLCard and TWL_FIRM, we can get something like Nintendont on 3DS

EDIT: And that pesky bootloader, of course.
 
Last edited by Billy Acuña,
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Just thought about something, 3ds has that 300 app install limit so installing 3ds games, ds games, apps, and emulators would take up the 300 app slots pretty fast. If something like this is ever working in the future then wouldn't people have to figure out how to bypass the 300 install limit for the home menu as well?
 
Just thought about something, 3ds has that 300 app install limit so installing 3ds games, ds games, apps, and emulators would take up the 300 app slots pretty fast. If something like this is ever working in the future then wouldn't people have to figure out how to bypass the 300 install limit for the home menu?
you wouldn't install to the homemenu We were trying to force boot into ds mode and install the fw of a flashcart
 
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Just thought about something, 3ds has that 300 app install limit so installing 3ds games, ds games, apps, and emulators would take up the 300 app slots pretty fast. If something like this is ever working in the future then wouldn't people have to figure out how to bypass the 300 install limit for the home menu as well?
A temporary solution for that (which technically works right now, if you install a ton of stuff) would be to have multiple SD cards with emuNANDs installed on them. So once you reach the 300 app limit on one emuNAND, you switch it out for another one. (Or you know, uninstall some games you may no longer play.)
 
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In that page @Hiccup linked to you have an explanation as to why DS games loading from the SD in DSiMode is highly improbable, by two respected developers (Normmatt and WulfyStylez - Normmatt in particular was really active in DS hacking).
To summarize what they said, DS(i) had no kernel that ran on top of games, the read operations where made directly in the game's code. DSiWare and DS cartridge games worked way differently (in DS carts, it's code running on the ARM9 which makes cart reads, while in DSiWare it's arm7 code which makes SD Card/NAND reads). And obviously, ARM9 code is completely different for each game... (if I'm not mistaken, ARM7 code was supplied by Nintendo and thus was the same for games made with the same SDK version).
So, *for each game*, you would need to reverse engineer the arm9 & arm7 code, put code in arm7 which reads from SD, alter all the reads in the arm9 code to ask the arm7 to read from SD (and this would probably destroy performance)... And not only that, you would probably get all sorts of misbehavior as DSi Mode has the CPU running faster...
Just buy a $10 flashcard, I bet this is never going to happen:D
 

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