Hacking Sky3ds (+ , orange button) firmware upgrade not working

[Sabinou]

Hello everyone!

I found in a drawer my old Sky3ds+ (orange button), completely forgotten, I had not used it for a year and a half.

I found that it doesn't work anymore in the two 2ds of the house (nothing happening at all when the DS starts with the sky3ds cartridge inside, as if I had not inserted a cartridge at all), so I concluded a firmware upgrade was needed, which doesn't come as a surprise considering how much time has passed.

However, something doesn't work with the upgrading process. Please, can I humbly ask you for help/advice in this regard?

An important - perhaps - precision, I don't use the original USB-to-microUSB cable provided with my Sky3ds+ order, I lost it. I use a generic adapter cable I use to recharge stuff.

Here's what I did.

- download firmware 1.40 (location dl?5izFHjru3h @ filetrip), extract the firmware.bin to local disk
- pull SD card out of Sky3ds cartridge and place it into an USB adapter, windows 10 mounts it automatically
- copy firmware.bin to the root of the mounted SD card
- pull out SD card from adapter, place it into the Sky3ds+ cartridge
- plug microUSB to USB adapter cable into my PC, and then into the sky3ds+ cartridge's microUSB slot

And after this, the green led of the Sky3ds flashes for a pair of seconds, and then immediately windows10 mounts its SDcard as an external drive and opens it.
What SHOULD have happened, the red led flashing from 10 to 40 seconds, doesn't happen.

I tried multiple times, I formatted the SDcard to fat32 using the official SDformatter utility, I mounted it with another computer running windows8, no success, all it does is mounting the card as an external drive.

Edit: no more time today, I realize I ought to have tested the sdcard with H2testw, maybe it got damaged over time. However, I could copy its 5GB of games to a local disk before formatting, and windows didn't pop out any error message, so a damaged card doesn't seem likely. I'll test that tonight.

At this point, I'm out of glues, and my googling and GBAtemp searching yielded no helpful results. Maybe it's because I don't use the cable provided with sky3ds+?
Would someone have an idea?

Thanks a LOT if you can help, I'll be grateful

 

[onibaku]

The cable shouldn't matter unless the replacement cable is defected. I had a Sky3ds+ earlier (i've now switched to custom firmware, which I highly recommend) and my 3DS didn't always recognize the cartridge so I had to reinsert it multiple times, literally up to 5-8 times until it would pop up on the 3ds system. It could just be some dust preventing it from being read by your 2ds. However, there have also been some reported issues with v1.40, you could perhaps try updating to v1.30 instead to see if that works.

Also, did you have any actual playable content on the SD card? Also keep in mind that the Sky3ds is not region free.

Was just rereading your post and I remember that after installing the update, windows mounts it as a external drive so you can transfer files, that's normal. The transfer rates are a lot slower than inserting your Micro SD directly to the PC. To me it sounds like it updated just fine.

Just a suggestion though, I strongly recommend that you check out custom firmware. You can find a comprehensive guide here https://3ds.hacks.guide/
There are several methods, if you don't have a DS flashcart or access to a hacked 3DS, you can use the seed miner method. https://jisagi.github.io/SeedminerGuide/
It's the cheapest way (literally like 2-3 USD), you need to buy one DSi game, you can find the compatible games for this exploit on a list on guide I posted.

It helps if you have a dedicated GPU on your PC but its not necessary. I found it to be more convenient and sold my Sky3ds after I found this. You can install homebrew and you install CIAs so no need to scroll between games with the Orange button, which I found to be a pain. (You can also convert .3ds files easily to CIA using the 3ds itself, in case you have trouble finding any CIAs)