hi, can you give me a credible source that they only have a limited number of header changes? apparently i cannot find how these DS flashcart work on google. thanks.
I got it for 'em.
http://hackmii.com/2010/02/lawsuit-coming-in-3-2-1/
Flash carts that work on the DSi and 3DS do so by faking themselves as games, so to prevent this once the DSi was released Nintendo started including signatures in the DS game carts, of sorts. This wasn't done before, so in order to run games that were released before the DSi/3DS, Nintendo added a whitelist for those games consisting of data to be pulled from the carts and checked. Flash cart companies find some data that will match the checks and update their carts to present it when requested.
Nintendo's firmware updates that block carts change (or increase) the required data for each game they find flash carts mimicking while blacklisting the old data alone (but since they pull new/more info, original carts still work fine). Why doesn't Nintedo just request a whole lot of info from all carts? Limited storage and processing.
Anyways so there's a few limits.
1 - The only games used can be older DS games without the sigs, so there's a big limit already. The DS has been seeing games since 2004, but the DSi came out in 2008, so none of the games after some time in 2008 are possible candidates.
2 - Not all games can be faked within that range, by now a ton of the ones used have already been blacklisted or have way too much information requested to be compared on boot.
3 - Flash carts have limited storage space, internally. This is an issue with the old-hardware model (44) Ak2i, for example, but also cheap R4s would hit this issue and be unable to update. This means that even within the range of games that are possible, the required data for some of them might not fit on a specific flash cart model (partially why some flash carts seem to have no problem pulling out an update while others might take a while).
And that's just what I know. There's likely even more limiting factors, as I'm not familiar with the exact data required by the system or how it's produced (because if it was simply "a valid header" then flash carts wouldn't be blocked).