So I decided recently that I was going to get a DSi and am interested in homebrew. My question is what type of prevention does Nintendo employ?

To my knowledge the original DS simply encrypted the contents of their carts, which was reverse engineered by the author of no$gba. What exactly have they done with the DSi that makes it harder to run code on? What have recent firmware releases like 1.4.x done to break things like iEDGE and similar products?

Thanks.

 

above is true but there is not really much point of buying a dsi now since the 3ds will come out soon your better off just getting a lite

 

Hmm, well I kinda knew that already

I'm more interested in the technical explanation. After all, the DSi can still play the old DS carts, so they still decrypt and run the old games like normal. There must be something they are doing in the new firmwares to try and tell the difference between a legitimate game and a flash cart. As far as I know Nintendo doesn't use sign their games.

 

There is... kinda.
I know of two DSi hacks, one is a save exploit for two games which can be used to execute small amounts of code, the other I believe uses the same games to load code from WiFi.

Neither of them are all that great (in terms of the end-user -- but this is a great start for people to work from), and most homebrew would be able to be run on regular DS' so making DSi exclusive homebrew is not only harder to do (to use the extra stuff you'd have to code from scratch), but be useful to a tiny group (those who own the exploitable games) of a smaller audience (DSi owners).


Read this if you're interested in articles about DSi hacking:
http://davejmurphy.com/dsi-mode-homebrew-anyone/

And browse here if you like pcbporn:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/micahdowty/se...57621023570420/

 

Hmm, that was one of my theories (of course that is just pure speculation because I do not yet have a device and I can find almost no information online.)

I can't even find information on the method of encryption used on DS carts. Supposedly it was figured out by author of no$gba, but despite being a free program, the author apparently rather keep it closed source.

 

http://hackmii.com/2010/02/lawsuit-coming-in-3-2-1/

This goes over the DS and DSi's encryption and booting differences in relation to getting flash carts working.

 

You mean he discovered the private key used to sign DSi games? I'm assuming that's RSA so I find that statement very suspicious.

PS I finally found some good sites: dsibrew.org and the gbadev.org forum. It looks like (from what I read so far) DSi games are signed and the contents of the firmware are encrypted and decoded by an on-cpu bootloader (something similar to how Xbox360 prevents unauthorized code.) If this is the case, I doubt there is going to be much headway made in DSi homebrew, unless someone does in fact find and release the RSA key which I find unlikely.

 

I enjoyed that article and it answered a lot of questions I had. I think I'm up to speed now.

 

In other news, Satoru Iwata has been fired from his position at Nintendo, has been deported from Japan, his house burnt down and his dog kicked.

 

They're not sitting on a mountain of cash (developing systems takes a fuckton of money), Nintendo is just aware that crappy games don't sell because they're crappy, they admit that instead of claim it's piracy killing them.

Also, the teams that develop games and the teams that block/hinder flash carts are totally unrelated.