I like this idea, maybe note a module for the infrared components specifically, but some accessory port?
Just realised I misinterpreted what you meant.
Is this even possible? I remember people discussing WPA/2 support for DS games but they're just not programmed to support the new connection, and would require rewriting the code ?? Did you have anything in mind to allow the connection?
If eMMC allows for more consistent speeds, transfers or performance, that's an interesting way to store the data, but I have concerns about the eMMC wearing down eventually. At least with SD cards you can always swap them once they die. Hopefully nothing required to function would be actually stored on the eMMC.
The eMMC costs around $27.62 AUD, it will add a fair amount of cost, your right (considering the FPGA only costs around $16.16 AUD). My plan was purely to have it be an optional feature though, so you could just choose not to get the eMMC NAND chip and save the $27.62.
Yes, this actually is possible, and has been done once before. The CycloDS iEvolution flashcart was capable of playing both DS games/homebrew and DSiWare/homebrew. It didn't require a switch, it would do whatever required switching between modes (if that is even required) all on it's own. Apparently the exploit was based on WinterMute's CookHack (I will have to look into how that works more later, and see if a better suited game could be used instead).
Most current flashcarts can actually already support larger than 32GB Micro SD cards. I use a 64GB Micro SD card for my more commonly used flashcarts. All you have to do is format the Micro SD card to Fat32 with 32kb clusters on any Micro SD card up to 2TB.
This is possible, yes, it would just require a lot of work. I am aware of DS games not supporting anything beyond the DS's WiFi protocols (it makes sense not to include unnecessary functions afterall). My 'concept of an idea' was to essentially just re-write or re-use someone else WiFi code and patch that into the DS games. Flashcart kernels already do this anyway for reading or writing data to the flashcart anyway, so it's not that foreign of a concept to implement. The difficult part is just figuring out how to tap into those functions and replace them correctly.
I have had this thought, and don't worry, nothing crucial is stored on the eMMC unless you choose for it to be. I will likely allow the option of the kernel either being stored on the eMMC or the Micro SD card, there is a separate SPI NAND chip that holds everything critical for functionality (such as the FPGA code, and the boot ROM).
Glad that the eMMC is just optional, but honestly I don't know if it's just worth the extra price overall unless it just does something way better than an SD.
Yeah, it's essentially just a much faster Micro SD card storage device. They both came from MMC cards anyway.
In the end it would all have to be custom code regardless, but I would probably base it off some ANSI C or ANSI C++ library and just adapt it with the necessary communication protocols to get it to work. It would have to be a very small WiFi driver though, maybe most of the code could be run on the ESP32 (which already has integrated modern WiFi capabilities whilst being very cheap), then all that needs to be sent is a set of basic WiFi control commands and the data.
How would it allow for games to connect though? How would they use the components on the card instead of the console's? And i still don't get what kinda patching would allow to use the updated Wi-Fi support, unless you do some sort of conversion when using the new Wi-Fi chip or something. IDK, I'm not too good with this stuff, but I'm curious
The way I would try to do it would break down into a few core things to be implemented or found out, all of which has already been done before, both in the NDS scene and elsewhere.
If it does indeed support microSD cards which can store more than 32GB then yeah I don't see the point of having that eMMC with that cost and size.
I was thinking about it the other way around, you get the flashcart that just works and the Micro SD card was the optional accessory. eMMC's main benefits would be that it's much faster and less likely to break on you, and would hopefully stop AliExpress sellers from including those junk Micro SD cards that fail within weeks.
It got a lot of interest at the time, it just cost as much as a Supercard DSTWO (not because it needed to), and they dropped support for it before the DS had it's final few games released, meaning it could never achieve perfect game compatibility.
I am tempted to have some sort of physical slider or dial (maybe multiple), some hardware interface that let's you change one set of settings, likely boot mode. This would probably tie into that.
From what I could find, PKMN B/W and PKMN B2/W2 are actually region free, so I might try using one of those two for the boot ROM as that is also a 'DSi Enhanced' game. Although the USA/Europe/Australia versions don't work on Japanese/Koren DSi/3DS consoles so that is a limitation, there will need to be at least 3 boot ROMs.
But do Pokemon Black & White have an exploit that can run on load from a save?
Not yet, but I don't believe it would be too hard to make one. I believe they read from the save eeprom on startup so they know whether to give you the starting cut-scene or not, so in theory I could just inject some code there to then load the flashcart kernel, bypassing the anti-piracy of the DSi due to just enough of the ROM existing on the flash chip for it to be seen as an official PKMN B2 ROM.
I would likely just merge the DS Phat/Lite exploit and the hacked system exploit into one, as they would both be the same (DS Phat/Lite exploit is the same as compiling and encrypting the ROM like you would if you were the developer of an official DS game, no need to worry about whitelists and spoofing official games here).
Well, what they offer isn't really a scam, it's just the micro SD cards that are made so cheaply, likely with uses NAND flashes, that die far too quickly that is the problem, the flashcarts themselves are often Ace3DS+/R4iLS clones that will work fine for years. If I could ensure that they won't include these e-waste micro SD cards, then this will never be an issue.
If you are talking about whatever exploit I come up with, Nin has long since stopped updating the anti-flashcart whitelist and anti-flashcart measures, they don't even provide system updates for the 3DS anymore I beleive. This is not something I have to worry about thankfully.
) and unlike the older DS games you probably can't trim them and use mirroring tricks to make them bootable using a stripped down small version of the full game's rom. (by mirroring tricks I mean most newer flashcarts don't store the entire game on it's flash. Maybe just 1.2 to 1.6MB or so depending on the required amount of usable data the rom needs to boot and reach the exploit payload. Typically sections of flash is repeated for all the unneeded parts of the rom to fill out space so game thinks there isn't anything missing. The mirroring tricks might also be used to include needed data for the spoof game to get past the DS Cart White list section 3 checks as well)
