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DS development > what happened to NDStech wiki?

#58027 - nunoalves - Thu Oct 20, 2005 6:25 am

1- what happened to NDStech wiki at http://www.auia.net/ds ?
2- who is working in the DS encryption ?

cheers

#58086 - Joat - Thu Oct 20, 2005 7:10 pm

Nothing 'happened' to it. It hasn't gotten updated much recently, but that's starting to change. I'm adding my notes and correcting earlier mistakes in the wiki, and dovoto should eventually (even if I have to chase him with a poking stick) add 3D registers / info to it. Sgstair or I will be adding wifi info after he releases it to the public. If anyone else is willing to add stuff they've actually tested on hardware and didn't just read/poach somewhere else, mail or msg me for an account.

<rant>
And re: encryption, no-one in homebrew is still working on it, at least not publically. It's totally un-necesary with the various ways we have of running homebrew now (this could change in the future, but it's extremely unlikely nintendo will manage to lock us out in any meaningful way on new firmware revisions, at least not with their current firmware staff). A card that fits in the DS slot will be much more expensive for the same amount of storage than a GBA sized cart (which is itself more expensive than using slow NAND flash in a SD or CF), and the main beneficiaries would be pirates.

Yes, yes, the main beneficiaries of current flash carts are pirates, but the key is that these already exist and are necessary for homebrew on the GBA. A DS flash card is *not* necessary, and doesn't exist, so why help them.
</rant>
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#58090 - tepples - Thu Oct 20, 2005 7:19 pm

Joat wrote:
It's totally un-necesary with the various ways we have of running homebrew now (this could change in the future, but it's extremely unlikely nintendo will manage to lock us out in any meaningful way on new firmware revisions, at least not with their current firmware staff).

The red DS already locks out the original PassMe, the Metroid First Hunt demo required for the new PassMe is out of print, and the SRAM stage of the new PassMe's Rube Goldberg style boot method doesn't work with a GBA Movie Player or any other CF/SD adapter.

Quote:
A card that fits in the DS slot will be much more expensive for the same amount of storage than a GBA sized cart (which is itself more expensive than using slow NAND flash in a SD or CF)

I was thinking more of an adapter for SD cards that fits in the DS card slot and then boots a .nds file from SD in the same way that the GBAMP with chishm's firmware hack boots from CF. At least the SD reader would be cheap to build because the SPI hardware interface is already present for use by save chips.
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#58095 - TJ - Thu Oct 20, 2005 8:03 pm

Quote:
(this could change in the future, but it's extremely unlikely nintendo will manage to lock us out in any meaningful way on new firmware revisions, at least not with their current firmware staff


From what I have read, there are at least 5 firmware revisions, and anything above revision 2 has yet to be circumvented.

#58122 - josath - Fri Oct 21, 2005 2:28 am

From what I've read, there are 3 different 'types' of firmware, all have been circumvented in some way

#1 - the original type, i think there is more than one revision, works with standard passme/wifime/flashme
#2 - the iQue firmware, in china only, works with the 'iQue' passme
#3 - the firmware on some newer red/blue DS's, works with the 'iQue' passme

#58126 - tepples - Fri Oct 21, 2005 3:05 am

I know what's in at least four revisions, and I know the existence of a fifth:

Original firmware : titanium Nintendo DS
Original firmware + backlight fading: midnight blue Nintendo DS
Original firmware + ???: supported by FlashMe, but I don't know what it does
Red firmware: Red Nintendo DS (Jump Superstars or Mario Kart promo), Pink or teal Nintendo DS (Nintendogs promo), and possibly the metallic blue Nintendo DS (Pepsi Twist promo)
Red China firmware: silver iQue DS

Don't rely on this; Nintendo reserves the right to put red firmware into a titanium or midnight blue DS.

Has anybody seen a dump of both the standard and iQue versions of red firmware? The iQue firmware is twice as big, and I'll take an educated guess that the difference has something to do with an ideographic font in the firmware, especially that iQue DS games don't run on original firmware or standard red firmware.
_________________
-- Where is he?
-- Who?
-- You know, the human.
-- I think he moved to Tilwick.

#59752 - Joat - Thu Nov 03, 2005 10:47 pm

The wiki to the rescue :)

http://www.bottledlight.com/ds/index.php/Main/Firmware

5 firmware revisions seen 'in the wild', not counting flashme revisions, 3 of which are old-style (work with passme/wifime), and 2 of which are new-style (or red style, works only with passme2, wifime is permenantly blocked without the RSA key). And I stand by my previous assertion, it's very unlikely they'll be able to completly block the passme2 class of attacks (not impossible, but they'd need a table of existing DS games and rules to enforce for all new games, and they're really running out of firmware space), so no need for a boot card or flash card at the present time.

Anyways, other recent changes include information on how to write and bankswitch flash cartridges, how the card save SPI bus works, how to use the 'rumble' pak bundled with Metroid Prime Pinball, and wifi registers / pseudocode.

It's not dead, I'm just the only one adding information right now it seems.
/me pokes dovoto, darkfader, and sgstair in the collective spleen with a sharp stick
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#59780 - tepples - Fri Nov 04, 2005 2:06 am

Joat wrote:
And I stand by my previous assertion, it's very unlikely they'll be able to completly block the passme2 class of attacks

Nintendo could just rewrite the SWI table in the BIOS (not the firmware) so that there aren't any SWIs that jump into SRAM. Yes, that would require changing and re-verifying the CPU, but Microsoft did something similar during the Xbox lifetime.
_________________
-- Where is he?
-- Who?
-- You know, the human.
-- I think he moved to Tilwick.

#59788 - Joat - Fri Nov 04, 2005 3:17 am

Indeed, while it is possible for them to change the BIOS, it's not particularly likely any time soon (huge cost / expense, versus what, a few days of programmer time and a few weeks of tester time for a firmware update). It took 4 years before they moved the GBA to a new die (OXY in the micro), and they didn't change much anything beyond ripping out or disabling the CGB core and integrating the exwram.

None of the GBA bios flaws were fixed for instance, not that there is a huge need to since it wouldn't make the GBA any more secure, but hell, most of the flaws in the GBA bios were carried wholesale to the DS, like the swi and cpu copy issues.
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#59800 - The 9th Sage - Fri Nov 04, 2005 4:35 am

tepples wrote:

The red DS already locks out the original PassMe, the Metroid First Hunt demo required for the new PassMe is out of print, and the SRAM stage of the new PassMe's Rube Goldberg style boot method doesn't work with a GBA Movie Player or any other CF/SD adapter.


Actually, I was just thinking...this SHOULD work, although I don't have a PassMe2 to test it myself...I noticed that you can upload SRAM to an M3 exactly as a regular GBA flash cart, so you should be able to boot it using PassMe2. In the M3's software package, there is a convertor for converting GBA .sav style saves to the M3's .dat format (although honestly they're pretty similar).

This would mean anyone who can boot the M3 in GBA mode actually could get this SRAM to load even if they don't have a flash linker...of course, this is basically only good for getting FlashMe to run, or homebrew that doesn't require saving to SRAM, but still. :) I have no clue if the Supercard works at all this way, but if it does it shouldn't be that difficult to get it to boot.
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