Homebrew [WIP] BrewMan - homebrew installer and manager

[Gizametalman]

Wow, cant wait to try this.
Just commented so in the future I can know when you're releasing it.
It would be nice if you added a ''auto update'' via Wifi, so in case you update your app, we wont have to take out the SD of the system to replace files.

 

[d0k3]

Wow, cant wait to try this.
Just commented so in the future I can know when you're releasing it.
It would be nice if you added a ''auto update'' via Wifi, so in case you update your app, we wont have to take out the SD of the system to replace files.

Reading this post, another good idea might be a 'installed apps manager' ie. the possibility to remove apps installed in /3DS/.

By the way, will this be only for 3DSX? Or will CIA / ARM9 Payload / etc... be downloadable as well?

 

[fatsquirrel]

Man would I love to see cia support

 

[MRJPGames]

Nice to see my homebrew in the list! Looks like a really cool downloader, I can definitely see this taking of quite fast.

 

[TheCruel]

Wow, cant wait to try this.
Just commented so in the future I can know when you're releasing it.
It would be nice if you added a ''auto update'' via Wifi, so in case you update your app, we wont have to take out the SD of the system to replace files.

Yeah, the games already having versioning to make this possible. When you open it, it will let you know if 1) there are any new apps added and 2) if there are updates to installed apps.

However, it won't be able to detect if a game is already installed without BrewMan. So if you already have 3DScraft on your SD, for example, it will see the directory (if it's named the same) and tell you it needs to delete it before installing. Only then can the installation be registered by BrewMan, manual game installations can't be uninstalled or anything.

Reading this post, another good idea might be a 'installed apps manager' ie. the possibility to remove apps installed in /3DS/.

By the way, will this be only for 3DSX? Or will CIA / ARM9 Payload / etc... be downloadable as well?

It may have CIA support in the future, but it have to operate a bit differently. I mean, there will be a CIA build of this, but for now it will just install 3dsx. It basically just downloads an archive and extracts it into the SD card.

It will allow for uninstalls too. It keeps track of all files extracted during installation to be removed. By default this means it will leave any save/configuration files created by the app. But you can just choose to remove the game directory entirely.

In terms of payloads for installing/updating CFW files or whatever, I'm not going to bother with that this first version. But it could technically work without many changes, assuming it's just files on the SD card. I would simply want to put all of that in a separate category with a little safety warning or something. And that also wouldn't be able to be updated as easily in the git repo, I would have to manually verify it since the PR bot currently expects 3dsx directory format.

 

[TheCruel]

After some more debugging, I'll be releasing this in a couple days. Will look pretty much like this:

 

[Robmead23]

Looking good

 

[UltiNaruto]

Is RAR5 supported aswell?

 

[Meowzors]

ohh. this is just like cydia.

 

[dangkhoa116]

Awesome! I can't wait to try it

 

[TheCruel]

Is RAR5 supported aswell?

It uses libarchive, which I don't think supports RAR5, but I'm not sure.

Either way, I don't know if I'll continue to support so many formats. If I do benchmark testing and find that one can decompress much faster than the rest, I might eliminate the slower formats. Not sure, since I always want it to be convenient for homebrew authors adding their archives too, but the decompression is the slowest part at the moment. The bigger homebrew that are like 10MB with many files (e.g. Picroxx!) take a little over 2 minutes to download and extract. And downloading seems to max at around 145kb/s which I should be able to tweak to increase in the future, I think.

 

[Rinnegatamante]

It uses libarchive, which I don't think supports RAR5, but I'm not sure.

Either way, I don't know if I'll continue to support so many formats. If I do benchmark testing and find that one can decompress much faster than the rest, I might eliminate the slower formats. Not sure, since I always want it to be convenient for homebrew authors adding their archives too, but the decompression is the slowest part at the moment. The bigger homebrew that are like 10MB with many files (e.g. Picroxx!) take a little over 2 minutes to download and extract. And downloading seems to max at around 145kb/s which I should be able to tweak to increase in the future, I think.

If you're using sockets to download files, you can try to increase recvbuf. It should boost a lot downloading phase.

 

[UltiNaruto]

@TheCruel Oh ok. Thanks for the info.
@Rinnegatamante Any ways to get the MTU value from network settings using cfg service? That could help him out on setting the recvbuf without getting fragmented packets because of recvbuf being higher than MTU value.

 

[BurningDesire]

Oh. My. God. That video. That video. This is basically cydia for the 3DS. This is amazing.

 

[thatbooisaspy]

.

 

[TheCruel]

Is custom repositories supported or will you add support for those?

Will probably add those. But they will be largely unneeded since you can add games to main repo and a PR bot will verify them. Added games can also be updated almost instantly with the PR bot that will verify the files and auto-merge it when they pass the tests. There will be a python script people can use to make sure their config files pass the verification before making a PR.

However, I won't accept all games. There is a certain quality level I'd prefer to maintain, and I'll reject/remove anything that consistently crashes or is relatively pointless (e.g. hello world app, app that creates a notification, calculator that just performs basic math, etc.) Hopefully nobody takes it personal lol, I won't just reject apps from people because I don't like them.

So for anything else that's rejected, you'll have to use another git repo. I'll add support for them later, it's not a priority atm.

 

[Giodude]

the homebrew shown in the video, is that it? Or will there be more with the final release?

 

[TheCruel]

the homebrew shown in the video, is that it? Or will there be more with the final release?

I'll add a few more today and tomorrow perhaps, but I'm more concerned with debugging it. More games will continue to be add after release, it fetches the latest stuff every time it boots. It even auto-updates itself (assuming it works, I only tested a little), so ideally you'll only have to download and installed it once and then just check it occasionally for new games added.

EDIT: it takes maybe like 5 minutes to make the config file to add a game, then maybe 5 more minutes to get the screenshots for it (still need to add screenshots for most of them). By next week I'm guessing it will have around 50 games. Unfortunately, that's most of the good 3ds homebrew at that point.

 

[GalladeGuy]

You have got to be kidding me.
I was planning on releasing version 0.1 of my homebrew downloader, Downlow this week. :/

Anyways, nice job on this! I look forward to seeing this grow in the future!

 

[Giodude]

I'll add a few more today and tomorrow perhaps, but I'm more concerned with debugging it. More games will continue to be add after release, it fetches the latest stuff every time it boots. It even auto-updates itself (assuming it works, I only tested a little), so ideally you'll only have to download and installed it once and then just check it occasionally for new games added.

well yea but i know tons of people who bug me about giving them new stuff, and it would be great the more stuff it has, like maybe gridlauncher updater and the retroarch emulators