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Hacking dumping

[DSpico] Pico Launcher Enhanced, and PicoDex, a browser tool for the SD card

rasalopa · 2026-08-07T14:17:06+00:00

Hi everyone. I have been working on a few things for the DSpico for the last weeks and I wanted to share them here. Pico Launcher Enhanced is my fork of Pico Launcher. It keeps everything the original does and adds: Favorites (press X) and completed marks (hold X), with filters in the app bar Play time, launch count and last played date per game A recently played panel and a statistics screen (START) Game deletion from the launcher, with confirmation Brightness control for the DS Lite backlight Per folder background music, and night variants for theme backgrounds Game count of the current folder on the top screen, and random launch with SELECT The last release was mostly bug fixes. The worst one: the favorites filter could come up completely empty. Marks were looked up by the game internal code first, so on a renamed rom the top screen found the heart but the browser filter, which only sees file names, could not, and the game just vanished from the list. A user reported it and sent me his gamedata.json, that file is what let me find it. Saving is also atomic now, before that a power loss in the middle could leave you with an empty file and no favorites at all. Install is the same as the original, rename LAUNCHER.nds to _picoboot.nds in the root of your SD card. Your existing gamedata.json carries over. https://github.com/rasalopa/pico-launcher-enhanced PicoDex is a browser tool for the SD card. No install and no backend, you open the card and it manages covers, folder icons and file associations. It also tells you which Pico Loader release your card is running, and warns you when the files in _pico did not all come from the same one, which happens if you update by copying only the files you think changed. And for a retail nds game it shows what the loader will do at boot, if an anti piracy fix matches your exact rom revision, the save type and size, and any game patch. Chromium only sorry (Chrome, Edge, Brave, Opera). https://rasalopa.github.io/picodex/ The board LEDs, the DSpico board has two status leds that the firmware leaves dark. I made a firmware fork that uses them, blue for SD card activity and red when the firmware cannot start an SD transfer it needs, which are the places where it already freezes with no visible sign. Here it is reading, and then saving: This one needs compiling the firmware yourself, so I also sent it upstream as a pull request with the feature behind a build flag that is off by default. If it gets merged it would be there for everyone without a custom build. https://github.com/LNH-team/dspico-firmware/pull/26 Everything is open source. Thanks to the LNH team for the DSpico and for making all of this possible in the first place. If something is broken or you want something, issues are the fastest way to reach me.

Thread starter Reaper
Start date Oct 15, 2008
Views 1,477
Replies 4

Reaper

Tͩ͒ͥ̈́ͧ̓͑̆̂

Member

Level 4

Oct 15, 2008

How is it even possible to dump games?

Rayder

Mostly lurking lately....

Former Staff

Level 5

Oct 15, 2008

Google "NDS Backup Tool".

AXYPB

Well-Known Member

Member

Level 2

Oct 15, 2008

That's one way to do it, but now I'm curious. What method did the rippers use before such tools existed?

Sephi

fool

Member

Level 5

Oct 15, 2008

They made their own software and possibly hardware for dumping.

carterman

Well-Known Member

Member

Level 2

Oct 15, 2008

Apparently the group Legacy made their own hardware dumper, but there exists skepticism over whether it actually worked: http://wiki.pocketheaven.com/Image:Homebrewdsdumper.jpg

But honestly, with slot-2 cards having been available for about as long as the DS has existed (at least in GBA Movie Player form), once someone figured out how to boot DS mode from the GBA slot, I don't imagine that there was ever much of a need for a hardware dumper when software dumpers could do just as good of a job.