MeGaBiTe1's Blog

Bye-Bye Blog

2005-02-27T17:45:00.000-05:00

As of today, I am part of TheModGods crew and will be blogging there rather than here. Do not fret-I'm only a click away. Go to TheModGods.com for your daily scoop of DS homebrew goodness from Brett, Theo and myself.

Thanks so much to all the people that viewed and supported this blog.

Play-yan Recall

2005-02-24T07:11:00.000-05:00

Nintendo emailed people that purchased the Play-yan media device from the Japanese order site, announcing that they have discoveed a problem with the stereo output. Really the problem is not that big of a deal and might have gone unnoticed had they not said anything. Sound intended for the right headphone plays in the left and sound intended for the left plays in the right. Replacement Play-yans will be ready to ship on March 5th.

DS Redesign Blurp

2005-02-21T17:37:00.000-05:00

Nintendo President Satoru Iwata hinted in an interview with SPOnG.com, that developers are working on redesigning the DS.

Hardware developers at Nintendo are always looking for what comes next and what will be the new direction as soon as they finish the design of any particular piece of hardware. Some of them are actually working on improved functionality of the existing machine, with some working on a rework of the exterior design exactly in the same way they did with the transition from Game Boy Advance to Game Boy Advance SP.

Read the full interview here.

Satoru Iwata, Nintendo President

NDSart

2005-02-21T15:27:00.000-05:00

NDSart is a site, which promotes the showcasing of doodles drawn on the DS (mainly through Pictochat). I think its a great idea, and the prizes awarded to contest winners are extra incentive to break out the stylus.

The first competition finishes today, and the second will begin immediately afterwards and span through Saturday.

The award for the upcoming contest is a PDA Panache Battle Stylus from MobileMilitia.com. The theme is military. Make sure to take pictures of your military themed drawings and post them here. The contest ends on Saturday.

Drawing by kensbitch

Crank It Up

2005-02-19T22:31:00.000-05:00

You're trapped in a waiting room, surrounded by back issues of Reader's Digest. Your DS screen fades to black and you knew you should have packed extra batteries.

Thanks to our friends in Japan, this shouldn't be a problem. This device allows you to cranck a handle to generate power for your DS or SP. What will they think of next?

Video of the crank powering a DS

Another DS Emulator in Development

2005-02-19T15:38:00.000-05:00

HyperDS is a DS emulator that is currently in private beta. Their website shows pictures of their program emulating homebrew demos. Immediately, I thought this was a fake, but according to Darkain it is legitimate.

Desktopman's Tetris running on HyperDS

V-Pocket Mystery

2005-02-13T11:03:00.000-05:00

Joystiq (and other news sources) reported recently on a trademark Nintendo registered for the "V-Pocket". One assumption was that this trademark was for some kind of handheld device.

SPOnG.com claims to have "learned from official Nintendo sources" that the V-Pocket concerns PDA software Nintendo plans to release for the DS.

The article states:

Nintendo will soon unveil a complete suit of personal organiser tools for its Nintendo DS platform, expected to be shown before E3.

First DS Homebrew Game

2005-02-12T09:24:00.000-05:00

Desktopman has coded and run the first hombrew game for the DS through his passthrough. Congratulations!

.hack//DS

2005-02-10T18:22:00.000-05:00

All of you who are unsure of how to contribute to the DS hacking community, here is a great way. .hack//DS is a distributed computing project like SETI@Home or Folding@Home. Basically, you give your CPU cycles to cracking the DS encryption. We're already 75% with this test, but new tests are lined up for the near future.

Read more about .hack//DS and dowload it here.

[Thanks shiz]

UPDATE: Test 1 is done with! Great job guys.

DS Analog Stick Mod

2005-02-08T07:19:00.000-05:00

A lot of people have been complaining about the DS not coming with an analog stick. Well DASGames took matters into his own hands and hot-glued one to the D-pad.

DASGames writes:

Ok, this is probably the most ghetto mod you'll see, but it actually works well. I got an old analog stick, and sanded the back down until it was just the face, then hot glued it to my Nintendo DS D-pad. It works great! And I know I cant close it, but when I dont want to use it I can just pull it off with no damage done because its hot glue.

Great New DS Site

2005-02-06T11:22:00.000-05:00

NDSTech Wiki is a new site that can provide a lot of valuable information for anyone that wants to get into homebrewing for the DS. This definitely deserves a spot on the link sidebar!

[UPDATE]
Joat, from the tech wiki, has managed to access the touchscreen using his passthrough. Check out the video.

Thanks to Darkain, TMG and LiftOffToSpace

Another Passthrough on the Horizon

2005-02-01T18:51:00.000-05:00

Natrium42, the man at the frontlines of DSLinux development, has recently created a blog. He is currently designing a simple and compact passthrough (called Passme) to be built with releatively easily accessible and low cost parts. For those who are new to the homebrew scene, in the DS's case, a passthrough is an apparatus that allows you to run your own code on the DS.

In his own words:

I have designed a small and simple passthrough using a CPLD (Complex Programmable Logic Device). Expected cost is $30 in parts. jzawaki is going to build and test it in about 2 weeks since this is how long it takes to receive a custom PCB.

Here Natrium42 includes schemactics and a partlist for his passthrough.

Rendered pictures of Passme:

Top Underside

I want to repeat, to prevent confusion, that this device is in the design phase and has not actually been built and tested yet. The plans look pretty sturdy though, in my opinion.

DS Dissected Once Again

2005-02-01T18:19:00.000-05:00

If you have ever wondered what the inside of your DS looks like (I'm sure you have if you visit this blog)? Nikkei Electronics Asia has performed the warrenty shattering deed for you. They cracked open a DS and presented its insides in an easy to understand fashion, complemented by a great diagram that tells what part is what. Lik-Sang has also done this in the past, for the record.

Have a look:
Nintendo DS: The Secrets Within
(Picture may be slow to load for 56k'ers)

[Thanks to themodgods.com]

Problem with Posting Comments

2005-01-29T18:19:00.000-05:00

I feel pretty stupid right about now. I was oblivious to the fact that the blog was set to where only registered blogspot members could post comments. Just a minute ago, I changed that setting, so that now anyone can give their opinion on one of my posts. Feel free to post anonymously. Sorry guys.

DSLinux Confusion

2005-01-29T15:18:00.000-05:00

Tech news site Engadget mixed up some facts (which they say came from waxy.org) in their article. The article states that we have successfully run linux on the DS. Apparently, some people thought that Natrium42 was running linux with his passthrough in the picture below. Really, it is only a homebrew demo.

No hard feelings though. Engadget and its sister site Joystiq can still stand proud in my bookmark folder and RSS reader. One good thing came out of all this-more visitors on the forum.

Natrium42's Passtrough in Action

2005-01-26T19:07:00.000-05:00

Qucik post before I'm off to school. Take a look at the progress Natrium42 has been making. He is now able to run a homemade demo on his DS.
Link to Forum Thread

DSLinux Updates

2005-01-25T19:33:00.000-05:00

First of all, I have written ChaosKnight about his absence and have received a responce. He writes:

Zach,

Actually a lot of things have come up in my life/real job that have
been preventing me from doing much of anything. I'm actually in the
process of moving so I only have internet access from my job at the
moment. Other than that I'm also actively involved in actually making
a game. =)

more details later.

Jon

Also, DaysSinceTheDoor stumbled upon a great blog by a DS game developer. The blog gives a lot of insight to the DS hardware.
Here's a quote to ponder, even though I'm not sure how valid it is:

The anecdote I keep on telling him is that the 1MHz Commodore 64 required a 100MHz 486 to be emulated at full speed in a cycle-accurate manner with a VERY well-optimized emulator (which I know the Nintendo devkit one isn't), and that didn't even cover the I/O subsystem. By that rule of thumb, the DS would need about a 20GHz P4. It runs like s*** on my 3.8GHz dual P4 because a 3.8GHz dual P4 simply can't emulate it fast enough.

Link to blog
Link to Forum Discussion

Play-yan Up for Preorder

2005-01-20T20:43:00.000-05:00

The Play-yan, an add-on to the SP/DS that plays music and videos, is now available for preorder on Nintendo's Japanese website. Joystiq has some useful technical information on this device that are worth checking out if you are considering buying a Play-yan any time soon.

[The Play-yan] is being offered alone ($49) or bundled with Panasonic’s Windows-based MediaStage 4.2 software ($59). It supports 5 hours of movie playback, 20 hours of music on the DS—4 & 16 hours respectively, on the GBA SP. -Joystiq

Yes, I'm Still Alive

2005-01-17T10:12:00.000-05:00

I'm sorry for not posting any news for the last week, but the fact of the matter is, I just haven't found anything lately that I thought was worth posting.

Here's a game that I thought was very original and creative. It's called Nintendogs (or Puppy Times in US), and is a puppy simulator. As lame as it might sound, it makes great use of the touchscreen.
Nintendogs/Puppy Times Video

Basic DSLinux GUI

2005-01-11T01:20:00.000-05:00

suse_geek and I have been working on a basic GUI to accompany DSLinux. The idea behind it is that if we are unable to port X atleast we will have a functioning user interface, rather than just a shell. This is intended to be a temporary solution. I know it sounds odd to work on a GUI before the actual port has been completed, but I wanted to contribute to the development in some way. The GUI uses dialog, which is a utility meant to perk up shell scripts. To check out our work, try the newest code on this thread. You must have dialog downloaded and installed for it to work. Remember that this is just a simple design and will be greatly modified if/when it is included with DSLinux.

Thanks to suse_geek! He started (and continues) to build onto the script and introduced me to working with bash and dialog.

New DS Card Adapter

2005-01-05T10:15:00.000-05:00

Natrium42 has designed a card adapter that fits directly into the DS cartridge slot. Check it out here.

narium42's says:

The card adapter is not a really a card reader. It basically just leads the internal card connections of the DS to the outside so that I can connect them to a FPGA. To test this card adapter, I connected it to the card slot that I made before. Then I inserted the SM64 card. Since I was able to play that game all electrical connections were fine.

So what you see in the picture is the NDS, card adapter, card slot, SM64 card. It's the test setup I just described.

On another note, I am able to read cards by connecting the card slot to a microcontroller board (no DS involved). In that case I am using a modified dumpds (written by DarkFader) and a simple program for the microcontroller to interface with the card.

I am still waiting for my FPGA devkit which will allow me to
1. Intercept the data that is sent to the DS card.
2. Inject my own code into the DS a la DarkFader's passthrough. This will allow me to run arbitrary code just like DarkFader is currently able to.

Tam XLink's DS Forum Back Online

2005-01-03T13:57:00.000-05:00

The DS board run by Team XLink is back online after having all of it's posts removed and the board locked. Forum moderator, TheDaddy, stated that the lockdown was do to immaturity in post content. Team Xlink is actively working on tunneling the DS.

Happy New Year!

2004-12-31T22:19:00.000-05:00

Happy New Year!!!!
May 2005 be full of good fortune, good health, prosperity and of course DS hacking!

Metroid Model Viewer

2004-12-30T22:09:00.000-05:00

mike260 from the gbadev forum has written a program to view the 3D models from the Metroid First Hunt dump.
First you must have the Metroid ROM. Then you should use DarkFader's ndstool (cygwin binary or source code) to extract the files from the ROM. Finally, go nuts with the viewer, checking out all the cool models.

Some Metroid models:
Samus's gun
Morphball
Multiplayer Level
Another multiplayer level

DarkFader at it again!

2004-12-27T21:02:00.000-05:00

DarkFader has apparently been able to manipulate Metroid and insert his own text. These are his own words, describing the process:

The ARM7 code was copied from the romdump to the cartridge.
At startup, the same code from the DS cartridge gets loaded to the RAM, but I only changed the execution address.
Since both the flashcard and RAM contains the same code, both relative and absolute addressing works. But the[n] at one point there's an absolute jump, so that I can remove the flashcard again without hanging Metroid.

For more information, check out this thread at gbadev.org

The text reads, "DarkFader rules ! Nintendo DS is a very nice toy :)."
Image Source: http://themodgods.com

DS ROMs Released

2004-12-26T19:49:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, I was told of a website that had ROMs of Mario DS and Metroid First Hunt for download. I downloaded these files, 1 of which was 16 MB and the other almost 9 MB, and although there is no emulator to test them on, they seem a lot more legit. Most likely a dump that was released by DarkFader or other devs. I rather not post a link to the ROMs here, so if you would like them, add a comment with your email address.

UPDATE: Mario DS has been analyzed and proven to be a fake. Not this again.

Different Approach to Homebrewing

2004-12-23T21:07:00.000-05:00

On the boards, a new member named ears brought up a possible method of executing your own code on the DS that I found interesting. His plan is very similar to the Mechassault Exploit for XBOX.
FTM is the acronym for the DS game Feel The Magic XY/XX.

Here is what he said:

Apparently if you insert a GBA cart into the back along side FTM you unlock hidden features.. If some one was to get a unencrypted rom dump, we could see the file structure and how the DS calls up the GBA slot and what file it searches for/executes. Since we can Flash the GBA cart, when we find out what file the ds looks for we could write an expliot and flash the gba cart with it under the same filename that FTM executes for hidden content. Thus the game would execute the File and comprimize the game system, although i have no idea about the abilities of this system i just thought i might post this idea.

DSLinux on IRC

2004-12-18T03:39:00.000-05:00

Just to let everyone know. DSLinux has moved to a new IRC server.You can find us at:
irc.freenode.net #dslinux
It might also be worth it to stop by #dsdev sometimes and learn of other homebrew development. Thanks to Gamma-X for the chan.

Movies and Music on DS

2004-12-18T03:24:00.000-05:00

Nintendo has announced that it plans to realease an adapter for the DS that can play MPEG4 and MP3 files. This device will function on both the SP and DS, and will retail for around $50 when released in Japan in mid-February. The "Play-yan", as it is called, runs on the DS like a GBA cartridge and has a slot to insert an SD card.
Too bad there is no actual conncectivity between the device itself and a PC. You will have to purchase a SD reader/writer if you plan to transfer any media files.
For some reason, this product doesn't strike me as new.

Some DS Mods

2004-12-18T02:53:00.000-05:00

It's late and I haven't had much time today to seek out any groundbreaking DS news. So I leave you with a couple DS mods to check out.

Using a SP battery with DS
Using a mint box as a cartridge case
Building a USB power cable for the DS

DarkFader Making Big Progress

2004-12-14T22:00:00.000-05:00

DarkFader has been able to decrypt the encryption on the DS cartridge. Data is transfered from the DS, to the board pictured below, and then to his PC via parallel port. It has been determined that the information on the cartridge is encrypted wih in XOR (learn more here) .
This is a big step towards running your own code on the DS.
DarkFader's DS code

DSemu Revisited

2004-12-12T14:14:00.000-05:00

My stubborness to work with this program seems to have finally paid off a little. It turns out that DSemu has trouble linking to a ROM that is buried in subdirectories. This is one of the factors that caused instant crashes for me and many others. If you move the DSemu folder and whichever ROMs to the C:\ directory it works. Well , maybe it works is stretching it.
The emulator is capable of running the test ROMs that accompany it, but I have not succedded in running a GBA ROM.

DSemu running a test ROM

Summary of the Interview

2004-12-12T02:27:00.000-05:00

The interview with ChaosKnight in IRC was very informative. Thanks to everyone who joined in. Here are a couple questions of interest.For the entire log visit this thread

MeGaBiTe1: What do you think about marketing and distributing DSLinux to gaming companies?

Answer:As far as marketting and distributing DSLinux, I feel that it would have to be at a very mature level to be able to distribute it. As far as profit, that is out of the question completely. It would be nice to see a cart though. Although I doubt it would ever come to that level of maturity.

Blanks05: To upload software to your DS, don't you have to have a certain chipset for your wireless router in order to find the DS and then upload software to it? Or are people finding ways to get all chipsets to find the DS? do you think that eventually it will work universally?

Answer: The method they are using now works with (I believe) an Atheros based wireless NIC and a heavily modified version of AirJack. A driver would have to be written for each chipset to enable this functionality. But don't go and buy an Atheros based card just yet.

MeGaBiTe1:What do you think of Hoss's statement about an initial release of DSLinux being out in February?

Answer: I was not in total agreement with everything in the interview with Hoss, and that was one of the things. February may be overly optimistic.

MeGaBiTe1: Do you have any recommendations for the forums? Or maybe how we should devide ourselves to work on different things?

Answer: My only recommendation is for people to educate themselves. Nothing ever happened by waiting for it to happen. So learn some things and start taking an active part. In my opinion, you got Metriod free for a reason... to take it apart.

ChaosKnight Available for Interview

2004-12-11T14:32:00.000-05:00

ChaosKnight, DSlinux's leading hardware developer, will be on our IRC channel (DALnet #dslinux) to answer any questions you might have on his work. I'll be present as well. See ya there at 10:00 PM EST.

Leaked DS ROMs... Fact or Crap?

2004-12-09T02:59:00.000-05:00

I'm leaning towards hoax, but hear me out.

I found this 47 MB torrent which claims to be a copy of Sonic DS leaked by Nintendo of Europe. The webpage, which linked to this torrent is not known for it's credibility (Some mishap with stealing DSemu and claiming it as their own). A guy in this forum thread says that the picture of Sonic below is a rip from the ROM. Although that doesn't seem to be the case.
The Sonic from Sonic DS has fingers.....this 3D model doesn't. :P

BlazeHedgehog wrote:

I've heard someone at the Sonic Cult has already admitted to Sonic NDS ROM being hoaxed, from within the Cult itself, even. After scanning through the ROM with a hex editor, it seems that's mostly true. Unless the ROM is either:

#1) Extremely encrypted or
#2) A bad dump or
#3) Extremely compressed

All that's in there is seemingly random data. They did a nice try at trying to simulate a "header" for the game, but the header for the Sonic DS ROM looks nothing like a typical ROM header - again, mostly random data with a few bits of text injected in to it (obvious stuff like copyright info).

And while I'm no genius when it comes to looking at stuff in hex editors, I've looked through NES, Genesis, GBA, N64 and SNES ROMs as a comparison as to how a normal ROM for dumped games looks, and it doesn't appear to match.

I guess since we have no way to test the ROM (no working emulator) we can't get a definitive answer, but right now crap is definitely outweighing fact.

DSLinux Wallpaper by DAn

2004-12-09T01:57:00.000-05:00

Here is a very simplistic but cool wallpaper made by DAn. Personally, I like it and use it. I'm not into those wallpapers that are incredibly eye-catchy and annoying. It gets tacky after a while.

1024x768

DS Emulator = Waste of my Time

2004-12-08T23:35:00.000-05:00

I checked up earlier today on DSemu, a program which hopes to someday be a DS emulator. Imran Nazar, it's author, states:

"Curently, since very little information about the DS is on public release, this is a Gameboy Advance emulator for Windows"

When I initially tried this program out (last week I believe) it did not function at all. I tried it on three different computers and all I got was an immediate crash! Right when you try to run a GBA ROM or even the test ROMs provided.....BOOM!

So, when I visited the project's webpage and noticed this news brief,

"First of all, the emu crashed a heck of a lot on customers' computers. I tracked the problem down to a stray line in the Pause menu option; all good now!"

I was anxious to download. Quickly, I executed the program only to see "dsemu.exe has encountered a problem and needs to close." As a last resort I tried to recompile everything with the included Makefile. Of course, that didn't work either.

So to end my ramble, I think it would be best to let this project mature some before trying to make any use of it.

Picture of Official DS Devkit

2004-12-08T22:50:00.000-05:00

While wondering about the forums at Emuboards I came across the picture below, which seems to be an official devkit. The picture comes from the December issue of Edge Magazine.

First Day of Posting!

2004-12-08T22:30:00.000-05:00

Welcome to my new blog! I hope to use it to organize information and research from DSLinux.org. I will try to keep this blog very up-to-date, so visit often. If you would like to contact me, email me here or post in the comments: megabite1 [AT] gmail [dot] com.