Homebrew Is there a way to edit the Nintendo DS Boot screen? (The home menu?)

[Momoro]

I've been coding / hacking consoles and systems for fun, seeing what everything looks like underneath the "neat" cover.

But, I've been having some problems with the Nintendo DS, specifically the Original, or "fat."

I want to edit the home menu, changing what everything looks like-- I like making new menus and other similar things for my own consoles, to make them feel "personalized."

But since the Nintendo DS Lite and the Nintendo DS Original (or "fat") doesn't have an SD Card slot, I've found no way to do this. Is it possible with R4 Cards? Is there a way I don't know about?

Please share your thoughts

I don't know which forum to post this in, so bear with me

 

[NotImpLife]

I only have knowledge of a single custom firmware for DS phat/lite, and that is FlashMe. So I guess it's not impossible to create one, but it has to be very hard. Also perhaps there isn't much to fit in the 256kb memory of the firmware.

 

[RealYoti]

Flash cards has it's own menu. Some of them, if not all, has themes support. Also you may try to run TWiLight menu from flash card.

 

[DanTheManMS]

As NotImpLife mentioned, the DS's firmware is only 256 KB in size. That includes the launcher for slot-1 and slot-2 devices, Pictochat, the time/date/user settings, the entire user interface, etc. The only practical firmware replacement is FlashMe, and it's identical to the regular DS firmware except that it makes DS homebrew launching easier. Though it also gets rid of the annoying Health & Safety warning screen upon every bootup of the DS, an annoyance enough to get *me* to flash any of my DSs with FlashMe anyway....

There was one other custom DS homebrew firmware you could flash, trying to remember the name of it, but it was basically a text-only version of the original DS menu: launch slot-1, launch slot-2, not much more. Highly risky, not as much safety built-in as FlashMe, not recommended.

While I don't think this was it, it's related: https://cturt.github.io/ds-cfw.html

 

[FAST6191]

There was one other custom DS homebrew firmware you could flash

Other than flashme there were three

Loopy/olimar also made an absolute minimal firmware as well as flashme. Sadly despite my love of white text on black screen type menus in this sort of thing it was lacking too much for me to go for it.

fwnitro was the big other choice and had a few interesting features, though also lacked others.
http://fwnitro.caitsith2.net/

Creebome appeared at one point
https://gbatemp.net/threads/creebome-ds-firmware-released.43280/

I think there was another in more recent times but the name escapes me, that said your https://cturt.github.io/ds-cfw.html link looks like it is what I was thinking of.

Main other thing I would link in all this is "fwunpack" which allows you to unpack the DS firmware that is otherwise compressed with all manner of rather specialist and varying between sections compressions. Won't recompress but usually has the source with it and if you have that you can reverse it.

Maybe also https://gbatemp.net/threads/release-fw2nds-build-firmware-nds-from-firmware-bin.508831/ if you would rather not play with a soldering iron and ppflash when you screw something up and need to manually write it back
https://www.darkfader.net/ds/

http://problemkaputt.de/gbatek.htm#dsfirmwareserialflashmemory for the sake of making something vaguely complete. Most tools that claim to edit the firmware just change the name/colours/language (think crystaltile2 has the option even).

All that said I seldom see the need to customise a flash cart firmware and those you are least look at for 30 seconds while navigating to a game. As a flashme modified DS firmware should then autoboot to whatever you are using for 99.9% of DS powerings and have otherwise knocked out the download play security then yeah even as a "for the sake of my intellectual curiosity" project then eh.

 

[DanTheManMS]

fwnitro was the other main one I was thinking of, and now that you mention it I remember CreeboMe as well.

You are such a wealth of knowledge and links!