I initially started off with IronHax (through TubeHax) when Smealum announced NinjHax 2, which was one of the reasons I joined GBAtemp. This was around the time of Mr. Iwata's passing and there was a lot of drama on here; some people supported Smea in postponing the release of NH2 due to the events at the time while others were impatient and called for an immediate release. I had a Zelda 25th anniversary O3DS and N3DS XL, which were both equipped with IronHax for playing old games via emulation and testing extdata mods. Around then, I was also doing the final research project and thesis for my degree and didn't have much time for games. I eventually got a SKY3DS purely to use as a Cubic Ninja cart for a permanent entrypoint as at the time it was actually cheaper than getting a real Cubic Ninja cart (yeah I know, it's piracy even if I just used it for NinjHax). Homebrew also allowed me to make ROM "hacks" of games I owned by loading custom data via HANS, as well as take screenshots that weren't all compressed and blurry, unlike the Miiverse pictures. The first mod I made was taking some manga-style drawings I did of my friends and adding them into Pokémon X as NPCs. They were really impressed.
Towards Christmas last year I read up on MenuHax and eventually applied it to my N3DS XL so that the Homebrew Menu could be booted quickly without having to go into IronFall first. I also shifted from using individual emulators such as mGBA and BlargSNES to unifying everything under RetroArch cores because they share the same configs and system controls, thus providing a more consistent user experience overall. Back then, being able to boot into homebrew via MenuHax was pretty much the perfect setup for me.
Towards the end of the year and early this year, Memchunkhax2 was revealed and people started using it to downgrade their consoles and install CFWs. Also because I had graduated by then, I had a lot more time on my hands to research about everything that had happened in the history of
3DS homebrew and custom firmwares. Against the warnings of not using Memchunkhax2 on N3DS consoles, I was able to downgrade my N3DS XL to 9.2 however didn't go ahead with installing a CFW just yet. Most of the risky business was tested on my O3DS and only when I determined it was safe did I begin trying more complicated things with the N3DS XL. I remember that the first CFW I used was rxTools on the O3DS. Originally I thought rxTools was a suite of PC applications for developing 3DS software and had to do a lot of reading before getting just a basic understanding of it. It took an entire day for me to set up my first emuNAND and configure the console to boot into it (via NinjHax). CTR Boot Manager came in handy then because it allowed me to not only enter emuNAND CFW, but also directly start up specific homebrew apps at system boot without even entering the Homebrew Launcher. Of course, I learned the hard way of the consequences of having linked NANDs and soon parted ways with sysNAND in favour of doing everything in emuNAND.
I had also gotten employed at that point and could afford a N3DS (since the N3DS XL had the IPS scanline problem and was inconvenient to carry around in a pocket). All of my consoles had been set up with emuNAND CFWs with rxTools for the O3DS and ReiNAND for both N3DS consoles. The N3DS became the daily driver while the N3DS XL was used for testing and homebrew/ROM mods. The best thing was being able to have homebrews right on the Home Menu as well as converting all of my carts to .cias and having them installed onto the systems instead of having to carry a bunch of physical game cards (again, still technically piracy but I paid for the games I play and did not distribute the .cias to anyone else, nor did I sell the carts so at least it was a restricted form of software backup).
With .cia versions of homebrews now available, I could use dynarec with RetroArch for better speed in GPSP and PCSX. This was awesome, as I completed The Legend of Zelda: Minish Cap from scratch on a 3DS without any problems whatsoever. Using MenuHax to boot into CFW gave me a ~80% success rate, but that was good enough for me. I started to learn more about homebrew that could be used with a CFW, particularly with things like the Video Channels Creator, which led me to create and release the "Pointless Fake Game Icons" pack (essentially a few icons that looked like nonexistent 3DS games such as Twilight Princess 3D, after launching one you would then be able to send the icons over StreetPass to other people and it would show up as your last played title).
At the end of February, A9LH had taken off and despite the risks of bricking, more and more people got on board. I was in the group of people who decided to wait and see how the early adopters were getting on before trying it myself. The first A9LH setup I did was on the O3DS, which took an entire day of SD and NAND backups and restores (I worked through the night over a weekend and stayed up until 6AM!), but I was pleased with the result as well as the added security of being able to repair NAND data without a hard mod. Having gained some confidence from adding A9LH to the O3DS, I moved onto the N3DS XL, and was able to get the whole process done in less time. Finally, I worked on the N3DS and by then I knew what I was doing and finished the task in a few hours. I has one O3DS and 2 N3DS consoles all running A9LH AuReiNAND on the latest emuNAND.
Last month, I upgraded the N3DS to a 128GB micro SD card and found that it had almost doubled the boot time. Seeing as A9LH and AuReiNAND had made CFWs much safer, I bit the bullet and migrated all consoles over to sysNAND-only and erased all emuNAND partitions, which significantly reduced the waiting times. This also gave me some more free space on the memory cards, which was nice.
Fast forward to today, I'm now using A9LH + sysAuReiNAND and the latest NTR CFW preview on top. This allows me to have all of my games on the console plus home-brews and a means to test my own homebrew/mods as well as restore NANDs without a hard mod and record 3DS gameplay without a capture card. The last 2 feats were originally thought to be impossible only 2 months ago, now we can do so much with CFWs, and I'm excited to see what they can bring in the future.
(because i couldnt buy a cubic ninja since im from costa rica).
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