Now, you are probably wondering what tools you need and what little specifics you have to check so that you can have fun with your 3DS as well. Some of you may already know what to do and what’s out there, but some may not. I’m here to give you a nudge in the right direction!
This part of the series will be a guiding hand for the what’s and the how’s of the gadgets you need. (If you missed Part 1: Clicky clicky!)
The ‘Nitty Gritty’:
If you are wondering what gear you need to get started with having some home made fun, the first and obvious place is to start with a Nintendo 3DS console. But, any old console won’t do.
For these tricks, as I mentioned in Part 1, you are going to need a unit on a particular firmware. For now, the only supported firmware for the Gateway 3DS (and thus the juicy ARM11 experiments) is at a minimum: version 4.1, and at a maximum: version 4.5.
If you are lucky enough to own a unit on this firmware, then all you need now is a Gateway 3DS card set. I would personally recommend you go to the website (here) and purchase one from one of their listed resellers. This way you can rest easy knowing that you are not getting a clone and all of the issues that have come with owning one.
If you are not so lucky, you may be able to find a local game retailer who is likely to have old stock and try your luck, or you may be able to track down a slightly used, or even unused unit on an auction site such as eBay. Failing that, you may be able to approach your local game store and have someone test a few units to find out the firmware version for you (use your charms *wink*).
If you are below 4.1, grab yourself a game cartridge from a local store, or a friend that has an update in the range of 4.1 to 4.5. For a good reference, check here.
OK, that is easy (enough) – what else do I need? Well, you are also going to want to purchase or reuse a microSD card for both the Red and Blue Gateway 3DS cartridges. Amazon is always a good choice in that department (you don’t want dodgy fake flash devices!).
After that, you need only follow the directions packed in with the latest firmware for the cartridges, and you are ready to rock.
But I’m On New Firmware. Can I Play Too?
Well, for now you can’t. But there are glimmers of hope on the horizon for you, if you cannot afford a second console for Homebrew (or cannot justify it).
Gateway 3DS has made mention on their website that with the success of their latest firmware revision and the disappointment on the change of cryptography for certain files on firmware 7.2, that they are actively investigating getting their tools to run on this firmware. Now, we don’t really have any reason to doubt them, but we don’t like to support vapourware here, so don’t go assuming you are out of jail free, just yet.
But what about Smealum? Hasn’t he got an ace up his sleeve? Well, the word on the street (see: twitter) is that his current project SSpwn should work fine on 7.2 as long as useful user mode exploit is found and combined with it, to which he informs that he has several leads.
OK, What About My New Games?
Well, the Gateway 3DS supports what they call EmuNAND. To put it simply; this system works by dumping a copy of the consoles NAND using some tools they have built into their solution. This dump is then written to a partition on the SD card so that when the user chooses to launch from EmuNAND, the system soft resets (part of the ROP chain we discussed in Part 1) and reads from the SD card partition (EmuNAND) instead of the actual NAND.
This redirection allows us to update to firmwares higher then 4.1 – 4.5 and play our newer game cartridges and write them pack to the SD partition, instead of our actual console (special care needs to be taken to always make sure you are in the EmuNAND when performing ANY update operation. This is denoted by a GW in front of the version number in System Settings when you are booted into EmuNAND)
Currently this works up to firmware 7.1 and is not recommended for use with firmware 7.2. This is because firmware 7.2 made some changes to the System Settings and Nintendo Network ID applications, as well as the eShop. Yellow8 provided more information on the actual firmware changes, including their modifications to system modules, NATIVE_FIRM, some titles, etc. For more technical information on the 7.x NCCH cryptography change, please refer to the 3DBrew wiki.
What Other Tricks Can It Perform?
For all the lovers of foreign games, you can also use the Gateway 3DS cartridge to run your imported game cartridges (yay JRPGs!). The support for this is now built in to the Gateway 3DS tools. All you need to do is launch into Gateway mode, chuck in your favourite foreign game and play until your heart’s content.
We also now have the ability to make backups of our game cartridges as well, making sure that if anything were to happen to our precious cartridges (flood, plague of bees, laser-dinosaurs) we have a backup of our purchased content that we can use (consult your local laws, of course!). Because of how the Gateway makes copies of the cartridges, these can be used for online play. Something the illegal dumps available online cannot do (unless you go breaking more laws and inserting copyright code (title IDs) into them… and that is very, very bad).
Of course, as we mentioned there is also…. homebrew! Now you got your hands dirty a little by getting your console all set up and our Gateway cards all set up, we are ready to move on to making our very own tasty brews!
I Want To Be The Very Best! (At DIY)
By now you are probably chomping at the bit to get some of your own code compiled and running, or getting some cool hardware mods set up for your console and for tricking your games.
The final installment of this series will focus on how you can set up your own development environment so that you can compile some other peoples projects and run them on your console – and – so that you can also bash out some of your own code and see what you can make!
We’ll cover how to wire up your own NAND reader and writer so that you can downgrade your console should the need ever arise and we will also cover a neat hardware and software project for doing some trickery in your streetpass enabled games.
Stay tuned for the techie conclusion in, “The Case of the 3DS Part 3: Weekend Warrior Workshop”…
