HaxxStation: DS Download Station exploit



13 years.

The original DS was released in 2004, and to this day, no hax for Download Play had been made.

Until now.

Gericom found an exploit in DS Download Station, allowing us to run any homebrew we'd like over DS download play.

Source code for dspatch: https://github.com/Gericom/dspatch

Enjoy!

Credits:
Exploit: shutterbug2000, Gericom, and Apache Thunder
Graphics: Jaames, Robz8

And if you want to load unsupported flashcarts on a DSi:

Yes.
Here's Apache Thunder's flashcard launchers edited for HaxxStation. @shutterbug2000 should put this in the first post.
https://www.odrive.com/s/23b9f39c-ae15-4c1b-8ff7-64344fa6f2d2-5939fc7f
 

Attachments

  • dspatch.zip
    19.4 KB · Views: 2,279
  • dspatchv1.1.zip
    19.8 KB · Views: 1,721
Last edited by shutterbug2000,

FIX94

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Just as a little update to the wii thing, I've spent the last few days REing the ds download station to get an idea of whats going on and now that things are a bit more documented in it I wrote a series of ARM9 patches that allowed me to dump all the data the station sends out onto my gba ram expansion, to accompany that patch I wrote a little program that executed right when I soft reset my flashcart, that then dumped the contents of the ram onto my flashcart sd so now I have a full send cycle worth of data to go through, probably will take me quite a bit but hey, progress :)
 

jerbear64

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Just as a little update to the wii thing, I've spent the last few days REing the ds download station to get an idea of whats going on and now that things are a bit more documented in it I wrote a series of ARM9 patches that allowed me to dump all the data the station sends out onto my gba ram expansion, to accompany that patch I wrote a little program that executed right when I soft reset my flashcart, that then dumped the contents of the ram onto my flashcart sd so now I have a full send cycle worth of data to go through, probably will take me quite a bit but hey, progress :)
So if what you're doing is essentially making a reimplementation of the Download Station, would that mean we can theoretically make a version of HaxxStation for the DS as a standalone homebrew rather than needing a Download Station ROM?
 

FIX94

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So if what you're doing is essentially making a reimplementation of the Download Station, would that mean we can theoretically make a version of HaxxStation for the DS as a standalone homebrew rather than needing a Download Station ROM?
you will still require the rom because it contains the station client signed by nintendo, thats the entry point to all this.
 
D

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Question about the flashcart Launchers: Are those only to load a flashcart in slot-1? or is there more I don't know?
 

FIX94

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After countless hours trying to get the wii thing any further I decided yesterday to write a patch for the station client to dump its send/receive buffers and realized that while the first bit of menu data always was received fine, no blocks at all afterwards came in and it sat there waiting forever even though I send the exact same data as the station server. Now I've spent a silly amount of time trying all sorts of combinations, buffers, wireless settings and FINALLY found what was causing it: a single byte not being set when sending the next data block, thus the wireless driver thought it always was old data and ignored it :rolleyes:
yep, this was received directly from my wii.
HNI_0051.jpg
Now I just hope sending actual ROMs goes smoothly, if not I can always go debug crazy again, these patches go quite in depth. If I get that done then the idea of sending unsigned DS ROMs to any DS via a wii/wiiu should be fully realized.
 

eduall

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After countless hours trying to get the wii thing any further I decided yesterday to write a patch for the station client to dump its send/receive buffers and realized that while the first bit of menu data always was received fine, no blocks at all afterwards came in and it sat there waiting forever even though I send the exact same data as the station server. Now I've spent a silly amount of time trying all sorts of combinations, buffers, wireless settings and FINALLY found what was causing it: a single byte not being set when sending the next data block, thus the wireless driver thought it always was old data and ignored it :rolleyes:
yep, this was received directly from my wii.
HNI_0051.jpg
Now I just hope sending actual ROMs goes smoothly, if not I can always go debug crazy again, these patches go quite in depth. If I get that done then the idea of sending unsigned DS ROMs to any DS via a wii/wiiu should be fully realized.

Amazing ! :bow::bow:
 

FIX94

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So, some more updates following up the menu stuff from yesterday.
Sending over files is just the same as sending over that menu data so that part was quite easy, the REAL problem though is consistency, sending things to the ds bios itself never was a problem thanks to it sending a "OK" response with the package number inside so you were sure to never miss a package.
The download station client on the other hand NEVER sends out any "OK" response or package number, meaning yesterday in the span of probably 6 hours trying to get a game sent I was able to get the tetris ds demo sent over like, twice. Oh and that was with sending one package up to 10 times, made each send take a good 10 minutes and still nearly always had it fail with 99.xx% being received, thanks wii wifi chip for being so inconsistent.
Now today I started implementing several indirect checks such as making sure after each send I get a "keep alive" message from the ds as well as a vsync happening and making sure the wii itself did not give me any error directly after sending a package, with all those changes I now pushed down each package to only be sent 3 times, pushing down send time of tetris ds to 3 minutes and over the span of the last 25 minutes of testing this with 3 different ds systems I was able to send over the demo 6 times so I think I am on the right track, hopefully I can somehow make it faster still by at least a little bit, though I fear it will just end up taking quite a bit to send over things and I cant do anything about it because the wii wifi chip is just not as good as the ds ones for this type of stuff.
 

eduall

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So, some more updates following up the menu stuff from yesterday.
Sending over files is just the same as sending over that menu data so that part was quite easy, the REAL problem though is consistency, sending things to the ds bios itself never was a problem thanks to it sending a "OK" response with the package number inside so you were sure to never miss a package.
The download station client on the other hand NEVER sends out any "OK" response or package number, meaning yesterday in the span of probably 6 hours trying to get a game sent I was able to get the tetris ds demo sent over like, twice. Oh and that was with sending one package up to 10 times, made each send take a good 10 minutes and still nearly always had it fail with 99.xx% being received, thanks wii wifi chip for being so inconsistent.
Now today I started implementing several indirect checks such as making sure after each send I get a "keep alive" message from the ds as well as a vsync happening and making sure the wii itself did not give me any error directly after sending a package, with all those changes I now pushed down each package to only be sent 3 times, pushing down send time of tetris ds to 3 minutes and over the span of the last 25 minutes of testing this with 3 different ds systems I was able to send over the demo 6 times so I think I am on the right track, hopefully I can somehow make it faster still by at least a little bit, though I fear it will just end up taking quite a bit to send over things and I cant do anything about it because the wii wifi chip is just not as good as the ds ones for this type of stuff.

one word: amazig!
Thanks Fix64 for this news!
 

eduall

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So, some more updates following up the menu stuff from yesterday.
Sending over files is just the same as sending over that menu data so that part was quite easy, the REAL problem though is consistency, sending things to the ds bios itself never was a problem thanks to it sending a "OK" response with the package number inside so you were sure to never miss a package.
The download station client on the other hand NEVER sends out any "OK" response or package number, meaning yesterday in the span of probably 6 hours trying to get a game sent I was able to get the tetris ds demo sent over like, twice. Oh and that was with sending one package up to 10 times, made each send take a good 10 minutes and still nearly always had it fail with 99.xx% being received, thanks wii wifi chip for being so inconsistent.
Now today I started implementing several indirect checks such as making sure after each send I get a "keep alive" message from the ds as well as a vsync happening and making sure the wii itself did not give me any error directly after sending a package, with all those changes I now pushed down each package to only be sent 3 times, pushing down send time of tetris ds to 3 minutes and over the span of the last 25 minutes of testing this with 3 different ds systems I was able to send over the demo 6 times so I think I am on the right track, hopefully I can somehow make it faster still by at least a little bit, though I fear it will just end up taking quite a bit to send over things and I cant do anything about it because the wii wifi chip is just not as good as the ds ones for this type of stuff.

one word: amazig!
Thanks Fix64 for this news!
 

Luglige

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My head is broken now but I am finally done with the whole wii thing, now HaxxStation can be used directly from my little homebrew sender.
https://github.com/FIX94/wii-ds-rom-sender/releases/tag/v2.0
It may not be as fast as sending a file directly but at least it works which was hard enough.
Good sir, you understand this more than I do, what does this do and how do I make this work? Without a flashcart?

oh yeah btw that looks good.
 
Last edited by Luglige,

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