Hacking Interesting Find w/ 3DS Demo Carts

drfsupercenter

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I'm not sure if the hacking forum is the best place for this, but I noticed something interesting that I thought I'd share.

I recently obtained a NFR kiosk demo cartridge of Mario and Luigi Dream Team (it's the newest 3DS kiosk demo as far as I know)... no I will not tell you how or where, don't ask.

Like all the other NFRs I've collected, if you insert the cartridge into your 3DS, it powers it on and boots the game up right away. Since it's a demo and is designed to be used in retail environments, it also disables use of the home button, so all you can do is hold power to turn the system off - and as soon as you turn it back on, it insta-boots the game again.

However, if you have the system turned on, and on the main menu when you insert one of these demo carts, it will show up like a regular game and behave as such (until you start it, then Home gets disabled etc)

Just like M&L Dream Team's retail counterpart, the demo "requires" firmware version 5.1. I tested this out on my Gateway-compatible 3DS XL which is on firmware 4.5 - when I insert the demo cart, it says I need to update to 5.1. However, if I stick the cart in with the system turned off, it boots just fine and doesn't require an update!

Meaning the game works perfectly fine on 4.5. I believe this has something to do with the game being made with an older SDK, similar to what was mentioned in another thread here, but I thought that it was worth noting that it *is* possible for a 3DS system to bypass the mandatory update if it's signed as a demo cartridge from Nintendo. (No hacking required)

The real question would be, how would one of these games react on a very old (let's say, firmware 2.0 or something) 3DS... I wonder if it would attempt to boot and just glitch out instead. If anyone has a 3DS on very old firmware that would like to test it, send me a PM, I'm interested in the name of science ;)
 

mathieulh

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3DS Kiosk (Demo) games are flagged as auto-boot so they will start automatically if you boot the 3DS with the card inserted. While doing so, it bypasses any updates requirements.

Mystery solved.
 

tHciNc

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This stuffed has been covered on 3dbrew

Notable features of demo titles:
  • Auto-boot demos generally disable the functionality of the home button.
  • The New Super Mario Bros 2 demo, retained the functionality of the home button, and had an timer which triggered the demo to quit after a period of inactivity.
Auto-boot cartridges, can bypass some of the functions of the Home Menu. Auto Booted software:
  • Doesn't show usage history in the Activity Log
  • Bypasses Parental controls
  • Bypasses Forced Game Card Updates
  • Bypasses Initial 3DS Setup
  • The console does not have a friends list presence.
  • Is still subject to region lock(see below).
Region lock is still active, so the home menu will refuse to launch demos with incorrect region lock will not load, displaying "An Error has Occurred". However, game card update partition checks do not appear to be done, which may allow launching demos that have region free encoding, but have an alternate region update partition.
 
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drfsupercenter

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Interesting, I was under the impression that NSMB2 was just an identical copy of the retail cart. I'll have to try my NFR demo out and see if there really is a timer.
 

drfsupercenter

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Also, it's curious that it would even have an update partition on the cart if the system bypasses it anyway. I wonder why Nintendo did that.
 

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