Hacking Trying to learn about hacking/make a team

[Brandon Pollack]

I am a 4th year engineering student at UF and have a lot of computer hardware/software experience. I understand the internal workings of computers/microprocessors etc. I thought it'd be kinda fun to hack a 3ds (main motivation learning, secondary playing japanese games to practice). My problem is I've never done anything like this before, so I was hoping someone here would be able to point me in the right direction on how to meet others who have, learn from their experience, and try to do this/make a team.

Any *pointers?

 

[yifan_lu]

It's usually show first, talk later. You release/demo something cool and other hackers will find you. I know from experience though that nobody will help you when you're learning. You have to do that alone.

 

[FAST6191]

Basically what yifan_lu said though when it comes to the learning thing if you ask specific questions in an appropriate manner at a suitable place (GBAtemp does good ROM hacking and not bad homebrew, other stuff varies wildly) they can get answered. Team wise it is probably those you know in real life until such a time as you get things done.

3ds hacking may or may not be a bit "jump in at the deep end" too but to be fair an awful lot of hackers did and do start out in similar positions to yourself and from what has been seen the 3ds is hardly the most hardened device ever, bonus is you still have access to lots of nice equipment as well.

 

[kyogre123]

Try analysing the launcher.dat file of Gateway 3DS, it seems to be a good beginning for 3DS hacking.

 

[Yacker]

As Kyogre said, checking out that file would be a good idea if your just doing this for practice. If your goal is to create a hack on 5.0+ then I would suggest, again, looking at the launcher.dat and then looking for an exploit. They usually come from crashes, I would suggest looking at some un-stable games (freezes, lots of glitches) and from there start testing with memory headers.

 

[FAST6191]

I do not know if I would suggest launching right into reverse engineering the gateway -- such things are likely to be quite heavily obfuscated and this would be on top of figuring out the 3ds.

 

[redkeyboard]

I'd go into something open source first, like android. Try simple things like making your own roms, etc. When you get more knowledgeable you can try something a little more difficult like porting ubuntuor another open OS onto it. Trying to start on something as closes as the 3DS is probably not the best idea.