Hardware Mystery flashcart used by Dora bootleg....

[Apache Thunder]

Looking to indentify what flashcart this is. I had found a Dora the Explorer saves the snow princess DS game bootleg. It's actually the second one I've come across but unlike the first one it is not an N-Card but some other form of nand based flashcart I've never seen before. Rom dumps show 2 other roms present besides Dora. YJLoader and YJMenu. The primary rom is YJLoader. This card uses the YJYJ game code. Does have Dora icon flashed to it to make it look like the Dora game. Seems to be boot up pretty quick. Probably a bit faster then the N-Card version did.



Identified the nand chip as a Hynix 4gbit (512MB) NAND in TSOP 48 package. Unlike N-Card this uses a SPI based chip for save storage just like retail cards and doesn't require a battery.

Looking to find any info on this thing. It seems pretty ancient and the yjmenu rom I found imbedded with the other rom seems to indicate this has a kernel menu of some sorts that is currently disabled. (maybe only appears if more then one game is flashed to this cart).

Unlike N-Card this does show up on 3DS Home Menu but since it's not presenting a 1:1 rom of the target game like my New Super Mario Bros bootleg, it will fail DS Cart White list checks on unmodded consoles.

Will boot fine on soft modded DSi but on 3DS the primary rom uses a arm7 entrypoint in the 0x03xxxx range and thus TWL_FIRM will not boot it. (shows error has occured screen).

This card is compatible with NTR Launcher though. Had no issues booting it with that.

 

[YuseiFD]

Aren't all flashcarts using micro sd for storage ? Or is this like a built in bootleg ? First time hearing about these

 

[Apache Thunder]

Some older flash carts used nand for storage and do not have any form of removable storage. N-Cards are a notable example. The M3 G6 and Acekard R.P.G are other carts that have nand storage. Though Acekard RPG is unique in that it has both nand and a MicroSD slot.

Most post R4 era cards moved away from this and are almost all MicroSD these days.

 

[SylverReZ]

Aren't all flashcarts using micro sd for storage ? Or is this like a built in bootleg ? First time hearing about these

There were bootlegs that did use NAND flash, primarily DS Linker/N-Card flashcarts for example.

 

[SylverReZ]

Rom dumps show 2 other roms present besides Dora. YJLoader and YJMenu. The primary rom is YJLoader. This card uses the YJYJ game code.

YJLoader sounds very similar to something that I've heard before. The 'YJ' name reminds me of the encryption system used by Sintax for encrypting their bootleg GBA games that used the same terrible game engine, such as Fighter Sonic and even a Ninja Turtles game.

I wonder if whoever is behind these bootlegs are from some of the team who worked at Sintax.

 

[SylverReZ]

Update: I've just discovered that these are undumpable, until now...

I recently purchased a Harry Potter DS game, which at first I believed was to be an N-Card flashcart. It wasn't until I opened it, though, that I discovered that it used the same circuit board as the Dora cart as OP shows. The NAND flash is manufactured by Hynix and it has a capacity of 1 GBit, which is roughly more than the original ROM's 64 MB (128 MB, to be exact). GodMode9 and NDS Backup Tool were unable to create a full dump; as a result, the file size appears as 256 KB rather than the full dump.

All was not lost, however. Thanks to @Apache Thunder, he was able to compile a build of NDS Backup Tool for me, which forces the resulting ROM size as 256MB to see if it would make any difference, and surprisingly, it actually worked, and I was able to see the dump in its entirety.

Funniest part about all of this, I can see why my cart wouldn't dump using the usual backup utils, the capacity flag is set to '1' in 0x14 (hex) which seemingly equates to 256KB, perhaps as a cheapskate anti-piracy measure heh.

I will post more updates when I have the time. Stay tuned.

 

[ghjfdtg]

This looks intentional because you can see this is not the game being presented by this cart. It says YJLOADER. That means it's a flashcart of sorts.

 

[Apache Thunder]

The kernel/firmware rom is only using the 256KB area really....so I don't think it's a measure to intentionally prevent dumping. I'm not sure why they would care if you were able to dump the game they used or not.

I'm thinking these YJLoader carts might be the "NDS 1:1" cart that was shown as one of the products on the original dsgba website. Can't really look it up now though due to internat archive being down at the moment.

Though that mystery NDS 1:1 cart might also be the style carts my NSMB bootleg are using....

 

[SylverReZ]

A little small update. I've noticed that similar to the Sintax bootlegs, they used some strange address mirroring at unused parts of the ROM, and that the YJ loader patches those in memory. I guess that's why the game wouldn't properly work with melonDS or NO$GBA, unless I properly patch the necessary bytes from the original to make it somewhat playable.