The homebrew scene is in great danger because of the legal pressure from Nintendo.
No it's not, libctru is an open source library, none of that code is owned or controlled by nintendo, if you make homebrew using nintendo official sdk, then they can take you to court for dmca/ Intellectual property theft
team xecuter was not the first company to get shut down, nobody remembers lik-sang?
It was done before on nds, gba, and hell original gameboy,
Forgot about gameboy printer and camera and other physical hardware addons, dmg gameboy/pocket even had a fish finder cartridge..., nds motion cards, romeo2 (homebrew dsp cartridge for nds that plugs via slot 2, moonshell had support for it), dserial, dserialedge, dstwo,
It can be done, it was done before on prev gen, people just want to run emulators and roms from an sd nowadays, if i could get blank pcbs, i could at least make a gpio board, using the eeprom lines, which is just a serial connection, i2c iirc, connect a microcontroller and now you can write software to communicate using the cartridge eeprom, the microcontroller takes this and can be connected to a 4g modem, this can be done with one arduino board and 3ds edge connector;
https://bit.ly/3lEetQM, i know the 3ds cart spec is much faster than nds and dsi, which was a limitation, alot can be done with a simple microcontroller and a fpga....
OT:
Flashcards are never good for anything and are just used as the last resort.
ironic, because GW has no other purpose.
Where do you think the term flash cards come from, back when you took a dmg or nes cart, pulled the mask roms, and replaced them with flash or eeproms, now i have a reprogrammable cart using a programmer, and if it has the correct mapper, i can also play any game,
thats how homebrew code was run on consoles before sd and cf cards were commonplace, you could reprogram them in a flash, and were usually homemade devices
gameboy was the most famous for homemade flash cards https://reinerziegler.de.mirrors.gg8.se/readplus.htm#Home made carts
flash cards are tools and serve a purpose, nintendo even makes flash cards for devs fyi
flash cards got more complicated because the hardware they run on became more complicated, and use CF or sd card, which also requires overhead to read and access them, unlike a direct eeprom
Again running unsigned is running unsigned code, the end result is the same
Only thing Gateway really lacks is rosalina, problem is that gateway encrypted their stuff, you cant complain because r4 and m3 ds did this too back in the day, people just figured out how to decrypt the firmware and now wood r4 and ysmenu exists, and is more stable then ofw and luma, luma likes to throw arm11 randomly when i run stuff or it doesn't work correctly, i run through gateway it runs fine (certain emulators and retroarch, and ntrcfw), depends on luma's mood i guess
Both can install cia's and can run homebrew, and run fine if setup correctly,
Cart emulation is faster imho than having sit and install cia's, homebrew and emulators dont take long, but installing several GB of cia can take awhile even with my uhs-I it tops 2.5MiB/s (n3dsxl), meanwhile i can drag and drop to the red card several GB 10-15MB/S and ready to go
Not also this, it also split the whole scene.
Commercializing also isn't the "spirit" of Homebrew. You are just getting another DRM on top of your existing DRM.
The manufacturers also always copy code from open source projects and make tons of money from it without giving anything back.
Nobody seemed to care when dstt were bricking cards, hell there were even viruses that bricked your nds...... all you had to do is download a compromised nds rom and boot it and enjoy the brick wall or hentai slideshow
Im not saying people should use gateway over luma, people should experiment, when you run any unsigned code youre doing it at your own risk, you should be aware that any console that runs homebrew code is technically no longer a game console, but is now effectively a personal computer, you write code for it, it will execute it, it is up to the dev as to what he wants to achieve whether for good intent, whether for malice, whether for profit, whether for shits and giggles...
Thats why you can buy cheap 3rd party accessories, because people revserse engineer it and make compatible clones (flashcard, controllers, power supplies, etc)
You should expect people to profit from this and sell the work,
look on ebay at all the people who sell modding services, using free and open tools, for xbox,3ds,wii,etc, they install exploits, and effectively sell piracy (install games/roms)
all they do is take 5 min to use a softmod, to install homebrew channel, b9s and Luma3ds, etc, people should expect work to be used for profit, they dont have to be okay with it, just like nintendo expects people to hack consoles, they dont like it however....
