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.