Homebrew Is there something wrong with A9LH?

[dimmidice]

Every boot writes to the nand, so in matter of fact he is right, every boot potentially can break your nand

that's not a brick though.

 

[pre10c]

So you really think that if something goes wrong during the writing that you are able to recover it without a nand backup and a hardmod? Good luck

 

[deSSy2724]

Because they think they can't. They're afraid their 3DS will auto-brick as soon as they think about installing a9lh on it.

Can you hardbrick by downgrading to 2.1 if you have an nand mod installed on N3DS XL?

 

[Mazamin]

I totally get this. But for me - as an almost exclusive Retroarch user - the time saving equation doesn't make sense:

It would probably take me longer than the average 4 hours the process seems to take most. Call it 6 hours, taking toilet breaks / changing of underwear and a mini heart-attack or two into account.

When I switch my N3DS on, menuhax on autoboot gets me into grid launcher and ready to boot an emulator core within 25 seconds, and I can be playing a game within 30 seconds of initial power on.

Assuming that the every super quick A9LH launch saves me, say 20 seconds of time and I can be playing a game within 10 seconds of initial power on, if I play two sessions daily that's 40 seconds saved per day.

By my very rough calculations it'll take me the best part of around 12 months to break even on the time spent installing A9LH. It's just not worth it for me.

I only use a9lh as I want to run an updated sysnand with sig checks patched. Pasta cfw would be good with menuhax except that you can't update sysnand.

 

[Deleted User]

Can you hardbrick by downgrading to 2.1 if you have an nand mod installed on N3DS XL?

Yeah, because there isn't a version of the 2.1 update available for N3DS, and IIRC you have to edit a certain part of your NAND to make your N3DS think it's an o3DS.

 

[princeken09]

NAND backups are twice as big on the new 3DS, so that's probably why.

That's probably the case, then. It would double the time for all NAND related actions (Which is like, 90% of the tutorial).

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It took me 4 hours since I need to validate all the TMD mismatchs before proceeding and I start from the very first part. But then again, If you already have CFW installed, then 2 hours is possible.

Yeah. I had CFW fully set up, and thankfully I didn't experienced those kind of errors.

 

[Purge]

I don't really get why people are so scared of installing a9lh. I used to lurk these forums a few years ago, and that was back when gateway was the only real option, which is why I lost interest since I didn't feel like buying one. Then years later I came back, learning about all these different cfw and a9lh. As soon as I figured out what a9lh is and what it is capable of, I dove straight in without any hesitation despite the fact that I've never had homebrew or cfw on my 3DS before. Like someone stated earlier, all you have to do is refrain from making a stupid mistake and you're golden.

 

[princeken09]

I don't really get why people are so scared of installing a9lh. I used to lurk these forums a few years ago, and that was back when gateway was the only real option, which is why I lost interest since I didn't feel like buying one. Then years later I came back, learning about all these different cfw and a9lh. As soon as I figured out what a9lh is and what it is capable of, I dove straight in without any hesitation despite the fact that I've never had homebrew or cfw on my 3DS before. Like someone stated earlier, all you have to do is refrain from making a stupid mistake and you're golden.

Maybe because there are still a little percentage your 3DS will not act nice and brick itself in the process. And some may not be confident with their knowledge with stuff like this and just choose to keep their current setup that works.

 

[Supster131]

I'm seeing people talk about time factor. It doesn't really take that long.. Sure, it used to take a few hours.. On the original guide that you had to do everything manually!

The latest version of the guide takes less than an hour. I installed A9LH on a friend's 3DS in 30-40 minutes.

 

[Deleted member 370263]

I've got Arm9loaderhax on my old 3DS (based on the old tutorials when emuNAND was recommended) but I've decided to take a menuhax-based sysNAND/emuNAND approach on my New 3DS.

I only got it brand new recently so I'm very wary about doing A9LH right now. My old 3DS is, like, 4-5 years old now, the warranty's gone. My n3DS is brand new so I don't want to risk it right now, regardless of how harmless it is. Hell, I was scared when the "An error has occured." message popped up when downgrading to 9.2 on the New 3DS (it didn't brick; it was a partial downgrade). Maybe in the future when I've got more confidence that I won't fuck it up (which could be sooner than expected?)

 

[ArmoredGuns1]

The guide takes a bit long because it takes way too many precautions. You don't need to format your Emunand if it's like-new. You don't need to format it twice if you're using an O3DS. You don't need to make another backup of your emunand after formatting if you're downgrading from the latest update because Sysupdater won't give you any errors if you don't have a faulty SD card.

You also don't need to put the NAND backups in your PC. If your SD has enough space, you can do the whole process with just the 3 backups that you need to make (sysNAND, updated EmuNAND and 2.1 EmuNAND). You also don't need to erase exdata once you're in 2.1 because you can simply insert the SD after turning the 3DS on and start OTPhelper from there.

So you should save around 2 hours by skipping some steps.

 

[Margen67]

I'm seeing people talk about time factor. It doesn't really take that long.. Sure, it used to take a few hours.. On the original guide that you had to do everything manually!

And now people are still afraid of bricking even with the safer method. (I did the old method with my O3DS and it worked fine)
Even though most bricks are caused by user error.

 

[LinkFan16]

I've been thinking about installing A9LH on my O3DS XL for some time now but I still need to make up my mind about A9LH having enough benefits to be worth the effort. I've been a Gateway user until now so most of the games I own are in .3ds format. Switching to A9LH means I have to get and install all these games in .cia format and transfer the saves among other things, which is one thing that keeps me from using A9LH. I'm not that afraid of downgrading to 2.1 to get my OTP since I managed to downgrade from 10.3 to 9.2 fine in the past. What I like about A9LH is that there is no need for emunand, so installing and playing GBA VC titles is a piece of cake after installing a patched agb firm. I also like the fact that firm partitions are preotected in case of a system update while using Aureinand. Not to forget that I should be able to unbrick my system without a hardmod in most cases if something goes wrong in the future. As great as these features are, at this time they seem unimportant atleast to me. Menuhax and Gateway are probably more than good enough for my needs. Then again I love to tinker with things like A9LH. But going through that time-consuming procedure just for the fun of it? Nah, not worth it (yet).

 

[Shuttleu]

Exactly. When you have a perfectly working setup, why would you wanna change that.

If nobody wanted to change their "setup" because their "setup" was working we wouldn't be where we are today...

"setup" can be changed for anything

 

[Just Passing By]

I've been thinking about installing A9LH on my O3DS XL for some time now but I still need to make up my mind about A9LH having enough benefits to be worth the effort. I've been a Gateway user until now so most of the games I own are in .3ds format. Switching to A9LH means I have to get and install all these games in .cia format and transfer the saves among other things, which is one thing that keeps me from using A9LH. I'm not that afraid of downgrading to 2.1 to get my OTP since I managed to downgrade from 10.3 to 9.2 fine in the past. What I like about A9LH is that there is no need for emunand, so installing and playing GBA VC titles is a piece of cake after installing a patched agb firm. I also like the fact that firm partitions are preotected in case of a system update while using Aureinand. Not to forget that I should be able to unbrick my system without a hardmod in most cases if something goes wrong in the future. As great as these features are, at this time they seem unimportant atleast to me. Menuhax and Gateway are probably more than good enough for my needs. Then again I love to tinker with things like A9LH. But going through that time-consuming procedure just for the fun of it? Nah, not worth it (yet).

Hey that's respectable. It's all up to you. If you like the setup you got going on, then there's no reason to change it. I like experimenting with new things so I took the dive, but like you said, it is a time consuming process (it can take 1-6 hours and even more depending on the person)

 

[astronautlevel]

I'm seeing people talk about time factor. It doesn't really take that long.. Sure, it used to take a few hours.. On the original guide that you had to do everything manually!

The latest version of the guide takes less than an hour. I installed A9LH on a friend's 3DS in 30-40 minutes.

I remember when the guide still had you downgrade SysNAND directly to 2.1.

Geez, those were fun times.

 

[Supster131]

I remember when the guide still had you downgrade SysNAND directly to 2.1.

Geez, those were fun times.

I still do that on the o3DS (but I start on 9.2).
Saves you a lot of time. N3DS I obviously need to use an emuNAND.

 

[astronautlevel]

I still do that on the o3DS (but I start on 9.2).
Saves you a lot of time. N3DS I obviously need to use an emuNAND.

I don't have the stomach to downgrade like that after I got a partial downgrading SysNAND to 2.1 the first time I tried. Then again I didn't format beforehand, as that wasn't part of the guide back then, and I totally forgot to do that.

 

[Supster131]

I don't have the stomach to downgrade like that after I got a partial downgrading SysNAND to 2.1 the first time I tried. Then again I didn't format beforehand, as that wasn't part of the guide back then, and I totally forgot to do that.

I got a partial once, I simply run sysUpdater again to fix it.

 

[astronautlevel]

I got a partial once, I simply run sysUpdater again to fix it.

At the time I didn't have OOT3DS or Cubic Ninja, and my browser was what got the partial so I couldn't even launch it to attempt browserhax. It's actually the reason I bought Cubic Ninja from my friend for like 15 dollars.