Slashdot Mirror
Nintendo DS Homebrew and Hacking
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."
slashdotted...
i cl e.php?storyid=230
4 3
here are other sites with pictures of the device
http://www.dsgaming.co.uk/html/modules/news/art
http://www.darkain.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=7
DS + Computer + WiFi + Skills = Homebrew game - (funky hardware * distribution hurdles)
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
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.
Want to learn about anything sexual? Check out the sex wiki:
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.
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.
There is more information online at www.maxconsole.com .
Seconded. It's one thing to not want a DS. It's quite another to want to play the games without paying.
I have a flash cart for my GBA, but I use it for it's quite unintended purpose. Development. I love my flash cart, and I think it's an absolutely wonderful tool to have. But I would give it up in a heartbeat if it meant that piracy on the GBA/DS was stopped.
Can we possibly *not* taint the discussion of legitmate, homebrew gaming with someone that just wants to warez ROMS? Thanks.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
They have Linux running off a GBA cart on a GBA, and since the DS can play GBA games, yes.
Actually it is a uClinux port.
Give them time, they are coming as evidenced
here
here
and here
Well if you want to try some of the homebrew games rather than simply pirating you can try http://dualis.1emulation.com/
http://nyamenation.org/
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.
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.
Darn I was just getting ready to make my first homebrew GBA game...
Nice to see on the touchscreen. With the president being some sort of dan-player, I wonder if it will come out officially.
Transcend Humanity. Please.
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.
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
If the copyright owner fails to make the works available in a desirable format, then they are failing their responsibilites under copyright. Consumers are then free to acquire copies in any way they see fit. This applies to SW for abandonded titles as well as music for MP3.
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
This sig has been enciphered with a one-time pad. It could say almost anything.
is this compatible on the DS? I was thinking about getting one....but im not so sure about compatibility. I would assume it is....
If it wasn't for C, we would be stuck using BASI, PASAL and OBOL.
Wow, you're answering a troll who was insulting an off-topic loser.
As for your GBA stuff, I agree with what you say but:
- game copies never harmed anyone
- your flash cart could be forbidden in less than 5 seconds by any government and you don't seem to realize how lucky you are
- using emulators to play actual real games is the only way to understand how a system works inside and you didn't knew this!
Now, the DS has been out for a little over 3 months. And this device basically allows anyone with a soldering iron, a somewhat steady hand and the right software to run DS code in DS mode from the GBA slot (at least as I understand it -- please correct me if I'm wrong).
And since both the DS and the PSP happen to be WiFi-capable, I'd assume that using proprietary media (cartriges and UMD discs, respectively) will only delay but not stop pirates in the long run. Looks like Nintendo has a problem.
On the other hand, I have to admit that I find this sort of exciting. Look at what happened with the XBox in just a little over a year: people are turning their $150 XBoxes into media players, thin clients, cluster nodes and full fledged Linux PCs. There's people out there who create homebrew XBox games from scratch. There's a whole community of people who actively develop for the XBox (my point being, there's cool stuff out there -- it goes way beyong being a software piracy thing). I'd love to see what the DS and the PSP can really do.
I disagree. The existance of development tools for the GBA for the cart prove substantial non-infringing uses for the device. Even if there were no Flash carts for the GBA, there'd still be GBA piracy (for play on emulators). I for one would not want to give up a Flash cart in order to stamp out piracy -- development uses override piracy concerns.
The usage of the word "pirate" for copyright infringer is centuries old.
As early as 1755, it was used to describe people who copied books unlawfully.
I hear that there are people out there calling people who break into computers "hackers" instead of "crackers", though. Might want to go fight that battle.
Bravo! Fantastique! We can run the DS code in DS mode from the GBA slot.
But we still have a problem, no?
How does one acquire the DS code?
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, etc. It might have something to do with the age group that is doing this type of stuff but I hope, for everyone, that this isn't the same way all homebrew development scenes work. I'm pretty sure Darkfader is a slashdot poster. Maybe he could clear up some of what happened. Probably off topic but I like reality TV so this seems interesting to me.
My Xbox Live Gamer Card
Looks like that ndsemu place has an old version of the DSemu emulator. I saw a version that got updated today, over here.
xkcdsw: the unofficial archive of Making xkcd Slightly Worse
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.
Yes, GBA flash carts are compatible with the Nintendo DS. For DS homebrew, the passthrough connects to the DS cartridge slot, with a DS card (Metroid Prime: Hunters Demo, although the CRC can be adjusted for any game) to do the initial boot process, and then the passthrough intercepts some internal DS calls, and executed the DS code stored on the GBA cartridge.
For GBA homebrew, you can use the flash cart in a DS without a passthrough unit, operating in GBA mode.
How about the fact that "crackers" used to be people that reverse engineered software (especially circumventing runtime protections)? It wasn't suck a bad thing to be known as someone that was good enough at assembly and OS internals to decipher encryption routines by looking at dead-listings of code, but now a "cracker" is what used to be called a "hacker". Now people that reverse engineer software are typically called "hackers" and have to choose which stigma to get stuck with, the older "hacker" stigma or the new "cracker" one. Then again, there is always going the route of just calling yourself a "reverse engineer".
It's cool that one of the linked sites (NDSWiki) is implemented as a Wiki. But at least one of the pages (here) 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.
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 little too large for my pocket and I keep accidentally leaving it home. How far away is this, in whatever form, does anyone know?
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
I've been batting this idea around some. What's the feasibility of porting the J2ME api to the Nintendo DS platform? I realize getting the wireless protocols will be a long shot at best, but it would be a real boon to homebrew developers if they could have a more forgiving environment than straight C.
Preliminarily, I know the DS uses an Arm9 microprocessor which J2ME does work with on several devices. Also, 4mb of ram is sufficient for J2ME development if it is a little low. I believe it is designed to run with as little as 512kb with a non-trivial program. And the J2ME source is available off Sun's website. Although redistribution of source is prohibited, binaries are allowed.
That's great, except opera sucks major ass.
It's like saying that you'd rather have 10 gallons of donkey piss instead of 20 ounces of fine imported German beer.
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.
xkcdsw: the unofficial archive of Making xkcd Slightly Worse
Actually, it's earlier than that. In the introduction to The True-Born Englishman (1701), Daniel DeFoe calls them Pyrates.
Had I wrote it for the Gain of the Press, I should have been concern'd at its being Printed again and again, by Pyrates, as they call them, and Paragraph- Men: But would they but do it Justice, and print it True, according to the Copy, they are welcome to sell it for a Penny, if they please.
But yeah, complaining about a 300-year old word is kind of childish.
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.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
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.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
The only rule about joining Geek Fight Club is 1) we are not to talk about Geek Fight club; for obvious reasons...[as preventing the homing of Gaydar operators, and anally raping us all unmercily with abacusii]
I would like to suggest replacing "computer hacker" with "e-viking," as hackers/crackers (what have you) pillage and often burn data.
The public will believe anything, so long as it is not founded on truth. --Edith Sitwell