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Hardware Hacking Entertainment Games

Nintendo DS Homebrew and Hacking 105

Posted by CmdrTaco from the because-you-can dept.
wraggster writes "Natrium 42 has updated his site with many more pictures of his Passthrough Device for the Nintendo DS, called the PassMe. In other DS News, Desktopman has updated His Tetris Game with a 2 player mode on one DS. Also for those interested in DS Hacking you have the DS Homebrew Reference Site and finally Darkfader the original DS Hacker."
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Nintendo DS Homebrew and Hacking More

Nintendo DS Homebrew and Hacking

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  • more pictures here (Score:4, Informative)

    by dmf415 ( 218827 ) * on Tuesday March 08, 2005 @04:31PM (#11880813)
    slashdotted...
    here are other sites with pictures of the device

    http://www.dsgaming.co.uk/html/modules/news/arti cl e.php?storyid=230

    http://www.darkain.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=74 3

  • Download Play! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by American AC in Paris ( 230456 ) * on Tuesday March 08, 2005 @04:32PM (#11880824) Homepage
    The DS is just begging for homebrew "Download Play" games. As I don't know a great deal about the inner workings of the system, what are the odds of the homebrew hackers coming out with a guide on how to turn your friendly neighborhood WiFi card/router into a DS "broadcast hub"?

    DS + Computer + WiFi + Skills = Homebrew game - (funky hardware * distribution hurdles)

    • Re:Download Play! (Score:5, Interesting)

      by 88NoSoup4U88 ( 721233 ) on Tuesday March 08, 2005 @04:45PM (#11880962)
      There are allready hubs in Japan that allow to download demos of games (which stay on the DS as long as you don't power it off) ; or there were plans to do so.

      I think it was also featured on /.

      • Re:Download Play! (Score:3, Interesting)

        by UWC ( 664779 )
        Those are official Nintendo hubs, though, right? Reminds me of the floppy disk writing stations Nintendo apparently had in Japan when they released the disk drive for the Famicom. I want to say that Metroid was originally a floppy exclusive title, but I don't recall.

      • Not only that (Score:3, Interesting)

        by mcc ( 14761 )
        Look at this [cube-europe.com]

        The Play Yan media player, which allows music and movie playback on the GBA and DS, launched in Japan yesterday. Along with it, Nintendo opened a new section of their Play Yan site.

        For your pleasure and amusement "Garage Games" are downloadable for the device, which can be saved to a Panasonic SD card via your PC. The first game available is Insect, and a new game will be unveiled each week until the twelve games are available. Upcoming games include BAT, which is a baseball-based game. A thir

    • Given enough time this is bound to happen, but if it's too easy it will make everyone just pirate the roms instead of buying the games.

      • Well, concievably they could build streaming software for games, a la psoload -- but that would keep you tethered to your download play host. I'm not really convinced it will work all that well.

        There are a lot of leaps to piracy that can be made from download play being hacked; but I doubt any of them will realistically lead to the ease of play of illegally copied games that the GBA has. Nintendo locked things down fairly tight this time around.

  • I've tried this (Score:4, Informative)

    by KingOfTheNerds ( 706852 ) on Tuesday March 08, 2005 @04:35PM (#11880852) Homepage
    Watch out when trying to build a passme, I've tried to build one myself, and after I soldered it up it did not work no matter what I did. I think it might have been because I held the soldering iron on the pads too long. Just don't be too pissed off if you try to build it and it doesn't work, mine was a dud.

  • Forgot One (Score:5, Informative)

    by drakethegreat ( 832715 ) on Tuesday March 08, 2005 @04:36PM (#11880873) Homepage
    The author forgot another great website http://www.darkain.com which has a lot of DS info involving WiFi hacking.
  • I just want to know who did the work on 50 Cent's DS's custom skin/paint job. I'd leave the "G-Unit" script off, but the camo is sweet as hell.

  • Great news. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Enjoi ( 857482 ) <(moc.liamg) (ta) (iojnekns)> on Tuesday March 08, 2005 @04:36PM (#11880886) Homepage
    What I always loved best about certain consoles, is that you could develop your own games for them. Made me feel like a real-life console developer.

    That's why I loved the N64 and GBA.

    Don't copy games illigally folks, etc.

    • Re:Great news. (Score:3, Insightful)

      by ajlitt ( 19055 )
      Actually, PassMe isn't really any good for copying games. All it does is insert a little code into the cartridge loading scheme that says 'Hey! Look over here!' and branches to the memory on the GBA slot. Unless you can somehow change up the app on the card you're copying to load files out of GBA-space (yes, the DS cart uses a filesystem), you're stuck writing code designed just to run in that environment.

      Which is good, since nothing puts bad light on the homebrew scene like people intending only to pir
      • Yes, that' the problem that plagued the Z64.

        it was actually legal to own it I belive, but so many people used it for bad things, you felt bad using it :P

        Contributing to piracy, etc :P

  • More Information at www.maxconsole.com (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    There is more information online at www.maxconsole.com .

  • I love the DS (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bonch ( 38532 ) on Tuesday March 08, 2005 @04:45PM (#11880963)
    I love the DS, and I'd love to dev for it. But one thing that confuses me is Nintendo's vague stance about its future. Apparently, they plan a new Gameboy successor later this year and probably revealed at E3. However, most people don't consider the DS a "third-tier" and see it as the Gameboy successor. Not only will people get confused and upset after having already bought this system only to see new Gameboy come out, but developers will hold off on developing for the DS to wait and see what the new Gameboy will be like. Chance are they will program for the new Gameboy over the DS based on name recognition alone.

    Does anyone have any info or links that better explain Nintendo's position on the future of the DS? Was it a one-shot deal? That's unfortunate if so, because it means there won't be a large library of games for this things. Already, it's pretty meager.
    • Yeah that kinda bugged me too. "Its not a Gameboy! Nope not at all! Sure it can play Gameboy GAMES and its portable...."

      I wouldn't jump on the DS bandwagon too quickly. Nintendo's last third-tier (Virtual Boy) didn't quite work out the way they had planned.
      • The difference this time is that the DS is actually a fantastic system. The Virtual Boy genuinely sucked. So it seems like a major waste of a great system for Nintendo to release it and then release another one a year later that is the "true" Gameboy successor.
        • If Nintendo releases the new Gameboy and it turns out to be a more powerful system than the DS (it has to be, right?) then the DS will go bye-bye regardless of how cool it is. Unfortunately for Nintendo, not everyone is going to think like their marketing department... people are seeing the DS as a new Gameboy no matter what Nintendo calls it and will see another Gameboy as an upgrade.

          It pains me when Nintendo does stuff like this. I have a Gamecube and I love it, but sometimes Nintendo's marketing depart
          • "Unfortunately for Nintendo, not everyone is going to think like their marketing department" Well it's a good thing I live in Europe (Ireland specifically) which Nintendo's marketing division has yet to discover. :)
        • While the virtual boy as a whole failed(I had 2), I will give them credit on the controllers. They were real nice to use and had an ample supply of buttons.

    • Re:I love the DS (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Good job on believing rumors and not following up on it.

      http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=58 091 [eurogamer.net]

      The "Gameboy successor" is most likely nothing more than an enhanced SP with multimedia abilities. Did you really think Nintendo has enough R&D to pump out two new systems within a year's time? On top of that, with the DS selling so well, would it really try to kill off it's own system?

      Sigh...people will believe anything these days...

  • Boycott (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Xyl3ne ( 802919 )
    Boycott http://nintendo-ds.dcemu.co.uk (the site in the newspost). It's run by an idiot (wraggster (if you're from the Dreamcast scene you'll know him)) who tries to be the whore of every scene there is. He throws up sites for every scene just to spam them all over and make money from the banner ads the sites are loaded with. Atleast if you're going to go there, block the ads.
    • Yeah, wragg does have a lot of ads on his page. Plus, at least Xylene posted his name. Btw, hey ray!
  • Darn I was just getting ready to make my first homebrew GBA game...
    • and the DS is NOT a reason to stop writing games for the GBA. The GBA is a very good (and powerful) system to play with. If you don't want 3D, just write on the screen. If you want to go further, you still can write your own 3D library and have fun with assembly optimizations!

      I hate this trend that people should stop everything each time a new gaming system comes out. Long live the NES and the Dreamcast!
      • Heck I still code in Z80 for the TI-83+ calculator...it is only recently that I started coding for the computer...
      • Bah, personally, my fascination with the DS has absolutely nothing to do with it's faster processor or 3D capabilities. The real reason the DS is incredibly exciting to coders such as myself is because it has:

        1) a touchscreen, and
        2) a wifi transceiver

        Those two features alone will allow things to be done with the DS that one can only dreamt of on the GBA.
  • Nice to see on the touchscreen. With the president being some sort of dan-player, I wonder if it will come out officially.
  • Anyone heard what was going on with developing the Gameboy DS gateways? IE, the gateway would let you use the 802.11 interface to play someone other the internet.
    • Most of them have been canned, saying its too hard. XLink Kai laughed in the face of those who were claiming they'd have tunnelling working within a week, as it then turned into month, into months. But their own efforts were equally abandoned around new year. I don't know if they really did just give up, or if they found out that warp pipe was going to be taking over anyways. (Expect Animal Forest DS to feature warp pipe tech)

      In short, not yet, and not on the visible horizon.
      • "(Expect Animal Forest DS to feature warp pipe tech)"

        I would love to see something like this substantiated. WarpPipe has spewed loads of PR crap for how long now about the DS and still has nothing to show? They tried to run a Viral Marketing campaign but bored everyone to death with it. Now claims like this. Sure...where is the proof.
        • Well, the PR crap seems to point in that direction (how can you be lost in a forest, and still know where you are or whatever), at least. The fact is, there aren't that many games out on the DS yet. Given their status as a middleware group, commercial product availablity is ultimately out of their hands. Nintendo's advertising strategy starts off at 90 days away from release, so around July we should see if my theory is true.
  • Can we get an executive summary about what PassMe is supposed to do, for those of us who have no idea what this is really all about?

    Thanks,
    ~D

    • Re:Err... Eeeh? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Dwedit ( 232252 ) on Tuesday March 08, 2005 @05:30PM (#11881491) Homepage
      The passme takes in a DS cartridge (Metroid First Hunt). It sends a modified version of the ds cartridge header when it reads from the ds cartridge. The modified header changes the ARM7 Code Start to point to GBA cartridge space. Then the ARM7 code edits the ram and starts up the ARM9 with new code.
  • ..., so let me get this straight. It took two and a half years and Michael Robertson's $100k challenge for the XBox's DRM mechanism to be circumvented (ie. broken without any hardware modification). And that's basically a modified PC build from off-the-shelf hardware we're talking about here (I'm working from memory here -- IIRC, the XBox was released in the US in November 2001 or so, and the challenge was completed around Feb/Mar/Apr 2003).

    Now, the DS has been out for a little over 3 months. And this dev

    • It took about a month or two for the first Xbox modchips to appear where all you required was a soldering ion, a steady hand and the right software and it's taken about 3 months for the first DS equivilent to appear.

      Hardly shocking.
      • Fair enough. You're right. I guess in a way, I was comparing apples and oranges (harware mod vs. buffer overflow/software-only hack).

        But you have to admit that judging by the hardware alone it almost seems like Microsoft wanted the XBox to be hacked (I mean, just look at the layout of the D0 points).

        My second point still stands though. The XBox has its killer app: media center. It's going to be very interesting to see what the new portables (DS/PSP) can do, especially if developers get to take full advant

        • "it almost seems like Microsoft wanted the XBox to be hacked (I mean, just look at the layout of the D0 points)."

          Microsoft wanted the XBox to be easy to debug.

          The i-opener had IDE pins on the motherboard for the same reason.
  • I don't know the whole story but Darkfader went a all melodramatic a week or so ago. If you would have looked for his DS page then you wouldn't have found it at all. He took it down and directed everything towards a NDS emulator, stating that it played commercial games (probably only to have emu kids email the guy bugging him about it) but it was some pretty lame drama on both sides. The emu author claiming Darkfader released it to the public and wasn't supposed to, posting pictures of him, trash talk,
  • It's cool that one of the linked sites (NDSWiki [bottledlight.com]) is implemented as a Wiki. But at least one of the pages (here [bottledlight.com]) requires a password, even though it seems to be a normal Wiki page. This is a fundamentally anti-wiki thing.

    Yeah, I admit I'm being a bit curmudgeonly about this, but dammit, the Wiki philosophy means something! I'd like to at least know why they're doing this.
    • The maintainer of the wiki has passworded the ability to edit pages, as he says he wants the information put in to be accurate and verified; only after it's been checked against different batches of hardware should the info go in. And of course, since some of the pages don't exist yet, they'll come up as passworded.
      • The maintainer of the wiki has passworded the ability to edit pages, as he says he wants the information put in to be accurate and verified;

        A warning to other readers: what follows is a fairly pedantic and high-falutin' rant about what Wikis should and should not be.

        But it sounds like what the maintainer of the site wants, then, is not a wiki, with all the fairly high-minded and somewhat risky factors which that entails. Or at least, he might not want to call it a wiki.

        I agree that a site like this, wh
  • You killed it

    What's a "passthrough device"?

    What I very very much would like is some kind of DS flash cart that I can load Linux or ciLinux or whatever onto from my mac, and Linux once running would be able to just treat the flash cart like a hard drive, writing to it freely. I don't really care about homebrew games, I bought the thing because I wanted to play Nintendo's games. But I would very much love to be able to run Linux and a web browser of some sort, maybe a TI-89 emulator since my real TI-89 is a
  • All this time trying to get the wifi (nifi?) to talk to a standard 802.11b AP still hasn't produced anything useful for the end user.

    I don't know about the rest of you, but that's really what I want. Not a passthrough. It would probably make uploading software to the DS a whole lot easier too, considering you could use an existing interface instead of hacking a new one together.
    • a) Using just wireless limits you to games the size of the onboard RAM. Moreover, the game code must occupy valuable RAM you'd probably want to use for... games. A flash cart is a *far* better solution.

      b) A flash cart or passthrough devices would allow you to write code to take control of the 802.11 interface in the DS itself and use it in standard Wifi mode (ie, no need to fsck around with Nintendos proprietary NiFi protocol).

      c) If you *really* wanted to download code on the fly (it would make developm
  • DarkFader is hardly the original DS hacker. Please stop hanging onto him like this; his passthrough was the implementation of two other people's designs, and four people had an implementation up before he did. Darkfader leaks emulators against the emulator authors' wishes, gives passthrough code to game pirates and maintains a nasty efNet channel.

    You would do well to look into Firefly, sgstair, darkain, or joat if you want to see real DS people. DarkFader has been an also-ran for some time now.
    • You're telling lies about me not being the first having a passthrough implemented and working. I was the first, and I'm not proud of it. I was just eager to do it. That passthrough code was made for homebrew developers and surely didn't give it explicitly to pirates. And as for the alphaversion leak... I shouldn't have done that. And what channel is so nasty? #dsdev? It's not mine.

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