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Created on Tuesday, 07 February 2012 06:00

Last Updated on Wednesday, 11 September 2013 02:40

Written by Lynx

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Welcome to the Nintendo DS Homebrew website. Your resource for homebrew Nintendo DS ROMs and reviews. This site was put together to try to give the NDS community a single point for tracking new and updated homebrew ROMs for the NDS.

New to Nintendo DS Homebrew?  Be sure to check out the Getting Started link on the main menu!

Thanks,

Lynx

History of Nintendo DS Homebrew

Table of Contents

01 – In the beginning

02 – The PassMe

03 – The PassMe2

04 – WiFiMe

05 – WiFi Bounty

06 – Cracking the NDS game encryption

07 – FlashMe

08 – PAlib vs The World

09 – ndshb-com.preview-domain.com (Shameless plug)

10 – Falling out (The divide in the community)

11 – Piracy and NeoFlash vs DarkFader

The History of DS Homebrew

In the beginning/About me

My name is James Zawacki (Lynx), I’m 33, and I’m not a gamer. Never really have been into handheld gaming since I was little. But, walking by a Nintendo DS store display, the intuitive hardware caught my eye. I saw the touchscreen and wifi for $150 and saw a whole lot more than a handheld gaming system. I was currently using a $100 Palm PDA with a gray scale screen, no WiFi, no 3D, etc. I could see a future for the DS outside of the gaming industry. It was then that I started looking into homebrew for the DS. Unfortunately, it was at a time when you couldn’t even purchase a DS. The DS launched in November and couldn’t be found on store shelves in my area (Chicago) till February of the next year. And even then, you had to be quick to get one. Lucky for me, I picked up one and in anticipation of DS homebrew, ordered a Game Boy Advance (GBA) Flash Cart to load the homebrew onto. It took a months to arrive and was just in time for me to enter the DS homebrew scene.

Also, I’m a pretty honest guy in real life, and I’m the same person on the Internet. I treat people on-line the same as I do in my every day interactions with society. There is no difference to me. Anything I say on-line I have no issues with the world reading. Even in private messages, when I am talking to someone about someone else, I have never said anything that I wouldn’t want to get back to that person. I would say the same thing if they were looking over my shoulder as I typed it. And, everything listed here shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone. I don’t hide any opinions or feelings. It does seem that many people think the Internet is a game. They do and say things as if they are in a fantasy world and that everyone is playing along with them. That belittling people has no reproductions in real life and there are no feelings to be hurt. It’s just a game, right? With that, let’s talk about DS homebrew.

The PassMe

When I arrived on the scene, there were about 6 people with expensive FPGA devkits that were able to run DS homebrew. DarkFader (Rafael Vuijk) was the first person to show the DS running hacked code where he had changed the text within Metroid Prime Demo. I was lucky enough to step into the middle of the PassMe design stage and received a copy of the printed circuit board (PCB) layout from Natrium42 (Alexei Karpenko). He had posted the plans on the Internet, and being that Sparkfun.com, who offered hobby based PCB prototyping services at the time, was asking me all the questions, such as why were they receiving orders for this same board, with the mistakes, that would lead me to believe I was the first person to order them. There were a few issues here and there with the current format and Natrium42 helped me sort them out and the PCBs were ordered.

The code on the PassMe used a simple insertion hack. The CPLD sat in between the DS slot and the commercial DS game. When the DS started, it would talk to the game card looking for authentication. Once this was complete, the inserted DS game would load into the 4MB of RAM in the DS and the header would tell the DS what memory address to start executing code from. Being that the GBA Slot (Slot-2) on the DS was directly accessible as memory locations on the DS, the CPLD would watch for the header information to be passed to the DS as it was loading. And when it saw the starting location it would insert it’s own address as the DS loaded, what it believed to be, the memory location to start the official DS game card. This replacement address would be the GBA Slot where unlicensed (Homebrew) code would be run from.

A few weeks would pass, and the first PCBs arrived to my desk. First warning from Natrium42 was that a trace needed to be cut because of a mistake on the PCB. Once I cut the trace, I began soldering the CPLD and capacitors onto the PCB along with some broken off PCI pins from a computer motherboard to make a “socket” for the DS game to insert into. After I couldn’t even get that board to work, frustrated that I either burned up the capacitors, that they were shorted, or something similar, I built a second one without the capacitors. That night, DarkFader and Natrium42 hacked the CPLD code to run homebrew from my EZF Advanced III GBA Flash cart. I posted a single message on gbadev.org showing that the PassMe was alive and real.. and went to bed.. Feeling great.

The next morning, I woke up to my name on the top of every NDS scene site as well as many tech sites. The feeling was overwhelming and the main reason I stayed in the scene. I never took credit for the PassMe. I always gave credit to DarkFader for the code and Natrium42 for the PassMe hardware. I have only taken credit for being the first person with a working version of it. And although I was only a channel for such a great and exciting event, the feeling of accomplishment was still there.

During this time, on IRC, Kraln (Jeff Katz) decided he was going to sell them. Numbers were tossed around and $15 for a PassMe was the price most thought was reasonable. Kraln also thought it was unneeded to provide a socket for people to insert a commercial NDS game into, stating that they could just solder it on. My stand was if an end user can solder the game to the PassMe, they can just purchase the parts and build it themselves. Natrium42 at the time had decided that he didn’t want to sell them, so I figured I would also begin selling them. I decided to go with the original design Natrium42 put together along with some pins to hold the commercial game to the card. Kraln wanted to go with a single sided board to save on cost (or maximize profit, I don’t know) and asked Natrium42 to create a single sided version. Natrium42, being the great guy that he is, obliged and provided Kraln with the Eagle files for a single sided version.

Next thing I know, Kraln is selling “Kraln.com PassMes”.. He made modifications to the board that would cripple the design, but the most disrespectful part was taking ownership of the PassMe. It wasn’t long before his Frankenstein PassMes were for sale on the web. I sat back and laughed as I saw pictures of hacked together PCBs with perf board glued to the back. See, one of the major modifications might not seem like a big deal when you think your users are going to solder their game to your board, but again, to save costs, he reduced the size of the PassMe. He removed the blank area past where the pins are soldered onto the PCB. This area was needed to support the commercial game that was to be inserted into the PassMe. This flaw would make it so that you couldn’t create a “socket” for a commercial game to be inserted into. Apparently he realized that users didn’t want to solder their game to the PassMe and he ended up with what he was selling. It wasn’t a pretty sight.

On the other side, Natrium42 was designing a new version of the PCB that accepted a cut down Game Boy Connector (GBC). A quick search on the net would turn up these connectors for $2 each. Out of the blue, someone popped up on IRC trying to sell DS game sockets for something like $6 each and both Natrium42 and I passed on them. Seems these were sockets to be used by the notorious NeoFlash team (Who weren’t notorious at this time), who were in the process of using DarkFader’s code and Natrium42’s PCB design. Natrium42 and I collaborated and I worked with a manufacturer out of China and spent around $2,500 on an order of GBCs. This is when I learned about customs and international orders. When you order $2,500 in little pieces of plastic, you have to deal with customs. $400 for shipping and a “Customs Agent” that did nothing more that fill out a few pieces of paper. But, either way, the GBCs were still cheaper this way than buying them for $2 each. I shipped a little over 500 of them to Natrium42 and began cutting them up for myself. Cutting the GBCs for our use was a tiresome task. Each one had to have two pins removed to make room for the band saw to cut through the plastic. After that, each one had to have the burrs removed. Once these steps were complete, the cut GBC was ready to have its 17 pins insert into a PassMe and soldered. Soldering was the easy part. The majority of the PassMes I sold with cut GBCs were sold for Christmas. This meant cutting hundreds of GBCs in my garage in the middle of winter. Chicago winters can be horrible and I spent many a nights with numb hands cutting GBCs to fulfill PassMe orders. To this day, I have around 2,300 GBCs sitting in my garage. I had sold a few cut, some uncut, but needless to say, they aren’t in high demand.

PassMe2

Nintendo realized the mistake they made and decided to add an address range check to the NDS. Now, after authenticating with the inserted DS game, the firmware would only boot within the 4MB address range within the DS. This would make it so PassMes (now referred to as PassMe1s) no longer worked as they would not be allowed to boot directly from the GBA Slot. Loopy/Olimar (Neal Tew) jumped at the call and found a work around. The process of the PassMe2 required the CPLD code to be specific to the game inserted into the PassMe2. For example, with the Metroid Prime Demo that came with many of the DSs sold, there was code loaded into the 4MB of RAM that made a call to the GBA Slot SRAM. So, the PassMe2 would still change the execution address of the header of the game as it was loaded into memory, but it would direct it to an SRAM call -^1- within that 4MB of memory that is loaded from the official DS game. Sitting inside the SRAM of the GBA Slot, would be a redirect to boot to the GBA slot address range, again, allowing us to execute DS Homebrew. The main problem with this solution for many was that the cheapest device to hold DS homebrew was the GBA Movie Player. This was a Compact Flash to GBA Adapter without any SRAM support. This device would not work with the PassMe2 and therefor required a more expensive GBA device to hold your homebrew code.

All said and done, I sold around 1,000 PassMe1/2s. Of every sale I made, I sent DarkFader and Natrium42 each $1. This was of the request of DarkFader on his site and the least I could do was provide him with the respect to follow this simple request. Natrium42 also followed this request and provided DarkFader with $1 for each PassMe he sold as well. As of this writing, confirmation says I can’t say the same thing for others selling PassMes.

1 – Correction, “the PassMe2 didn’t jump directly to code that jumped to GBA SRAM, it jumped to code that called an invalid SWI that happened to jump into SRAM” [–pagebreak–] WiFiMe

WiFiMe used a similar process as PassMe but did it to the Wireless Multiboot (WMB) header. FireFly (Tim Schuerewegen) released a special driver for WiFi Cards that used the RT2500 or RT2560 chipset to manipulate the data being transfered. Now, before we go much further, I would like to point out the fact that it actually should have been called NiFiMe, as it uses NiFi (Nintendo’s implementation of WiFi), not the 802.11 standard of WiFi. This is the reason WiFiMe only works on a specific chipset. See, most chipsets are designed to not allow you to send non-compliant packets. But, to be able to talk NiFi, you needed hardware that would not try to correct the data you are sending. This also required the card to use drivers that made it a NiFi card. The card (with the WiFiMe drivers) would no longer be usable as a WiFi card. It would become a completely new device. WiFiMe went to the wayside along with PassMe1. Nintendo also corrected the WMB header so this method could no longer be used to boot Homebrew from the Slot-2.

WiFi Bounty

I was all for the WiFi bounty from the beginning. It was my first run in with StoneCypher (John Haugeland) and it wouldn’t be my last. I had donated around $200 I believe in the beginning. After I had done that, StoneCypher had invited me to #realdsdev. A “secret” channel for all the “real” NDS homebrew developers. This is when I began to realize that not all was what it seemed in the homebrew community. That there were divisions setup between “top” devers and the rest of the crowd. Not much of a surprise really, but my main awakening came when I realized which “devers”, and I use that word loosely know, were part of this channel. Being that I can’t code for the life of me, it might help you understand that others in this group had not contributed to the DS community at all. Only put in their position because they may have done something back in the GBA homebrew days. But, for me, being that I entered the scene with the DS, they were nobodies to me. Among these nobodies was StoneCypher himself. Apparently he’s been around for a long time, but all of my interactions with him were negative. Not necessarily negative toward me, but negative toward pretty much everyone in the channel. It wasn’t until SgStair (Stephen Stair, claimer of the WiFi bounty on all accounts) said that he was giving a gift to the community for a holiday to claim the WiFi bounty, that things really began to go south. Well, StoneCypher thought otherwise, and said that it wasn’t a gift, he was paying for it. Of course, I didn’t agree with this, as only $250 of the bounty was even his. At that point, I had donated $300 and there were many other that donated large sums of money toward the bounty. If anything, the community was paying SgStair for access to the WiFi hardware. In private conversations with StoneCypher, it was quick for me to realize the guy wasn’t all there. He lives in some kind of fantasy world. With, some of the “head” homebrewers on his side, the guy continually disrespects others in the scene with no repercussions. Seems he is untouchable. Blatantly abusing his OP powers in #dsdev, with other “respected” OPs sitting idle allowing it. This was only the beginning of the divide.

On top of this, after SgStair received the WiFi bounty, the bounty page remained unchanged for a long time. Anyone just browsing along would come across it and not even know it was over. Anyone donating to it was no longer added to the list of people donating. I know, because I had a friend donate to it to see what was going on. Nothing changed. The whole page became a phishing scheme. Numerous attempts to contact StoneCypher asking him to update the page fell on deaf ears as the donations continued to trickle in. It wasn’t till there was rumors of some kind of conspiracy that StoneCypher finally “found time” to update the page and show the bounty as fully paid. But, even to this day, the donate button is still there. For someone to say they didn’t have 30 seconds to change a few numbers and post that it was over is ridiculous. Some of these conspiracy theories where that StoneCypher was skimming money from the bounty to pay Nintendo. That’s a good one, even I laughed at that one.. Another was that SgStair and StoneCypher were in it together, splitting the bounty. Even if that was true, what would it really matter? The bounty was to pay for a homebrew WiFi library.. and we got one. Who cares where the money went. The bounty did directly influence a WiFi library, as without it, nobody was willing to take on the task, or release anything. So even if we say SgStair had everything working and was just waiting for the WiFi bounty to release it, what would that matter? It wouldn’t. The only one that caught my eye was the fact that StoneCypher could have been skimming off the top of what he paid SgStair. This is the only one that could be done without anyone really knowing it, and the only way to prove it would be with transaction logs from both of their PayPal accounts that had not been tampered with. It would be easy for someone accepting money into their PayPal account to not fully account for it. Not only that, but if the PayPal account is used for other transactions, WiFi bounty ones could get overlooked by mistake. I mean, it took a long time to update a page, how much time does he have to filter through donations? Of course, these all remain theories. After donating $300 to the bounty, and then the bounty being claimed and a library provided, I decided to run a homebrew WiFi compo to get the word out that the bounty had been over and to try to thank the homebrew community for everything they had offered and for the success of the PassMe sales. Over $500 in prizes were offered. With only 4 entries, the compo was a disappointment. Instead of just offering the 3 place prizes, everyone received a prize. [–pagebreak–] Cracking the NDS game encryption Again, as with everything else, people said the game encryption could not be cracked and the topic was a waste of time. It was discussed for a while and made up numbers were saying it would take decades to crack. I was saying it could be cracked in 10 seconds.. it just needs 1 lucky guess. Well, DarkFader took on the challenge and created a small application that would allow the community to create a global cracking attack. On top of that, it became a brute force contest, as the application would report back PC horsepower to a website for anyone to take a look at. It wasn’t long before everyone was running this application on their PCs for two reasons. The main goal, of course, was to help crack the encryption of a commercial DS game, but the real goal for many was to fight for the top spot on the list of top horsepower. Believe it or not, the end came quicker than anyone would have expected, and at some 82% complete, the encryption was cracked. It was cracked so quickly, that many barely even had the chance to install the application before it was over. Luckily, reverse engineering of the firmware dumps allowed for results to be usable. After the encryption was cracked, information regarding the process of creating your own authenticating game was passed around to a select few. How to actually do it was never publicly released (that I know of) but the information to do it is available, and if you know how to use that information, you can create your very one slot-1 game that will not require a PassMe1/2 and it will work on any DS. This gave birth to the “NoPass”. Because this process isn’t passing any information from a commercial game card, it allowed for the NoPass to be the same size as a game card so that nothing was sticking out of the DS. The first NoPass to hit the market that I remember was the Datel Max Media Launcher. It simply did the same thing a PassMe did. After authenticating with the DS, it redirected to the GBA Slot, allowing the GBA MP and other devices without SRAM support to work again. At this point, an additional benefit to installing FlashMe was so that you didn’t have to insert the NoPass Device anymore. So, let’s talk about FlashMe… [–pagebreak–] FlashMe

FlashMe is a firmware hack of the original DS firmware that added a few things. First, it added some recovery code to the first block of the firmware. This section was secure, and is the reason for needing to short SL1 -^1- to install. Along with the recovery code that originally would force the DS to boot to slot-2 and later, slot-1 due to their popularity, it added code to the end of the firmware. In the beginning, this “blank” area in the firmware had an unknown use. It wasn’t long till the first WiFi enabled games hit the market, and we found out what this area of the firmware was for. It was used to store the WiFi settings. Luckily for us, the recovery code allowed anyone with a FlashMe’d DS to recover after running a WiFi enabled game. But, what now? Where to put the extra code that we needed? Well, Olimar/Loopy was able to re-compress the firmware. This allowed him to put the additional code into the same area as the main firmware so that there would not be any more surprises in the future. Later, when the game encryption was cracked, the only reason to install FlashMe was for the recovery code. Even today, it is a good idea to install FlashMe to add the recovery code just in case someone tries to release something bad. It also added a “feature” that removed the annoying health warning screen on bootup. Another excellent feature of FlashMe was the fact that it removed the RSA check for WMB downloads. This would allow you to use the same hardware for WiFiMe, but send your homebrew game/app over it as well. This is an easy way to test/debug homebrew while you are developing it, instead of removing the card from the DS, putting it in your computer, writing the updated version, removing it from your computer, inserting it back into the card/DS and turning your DS back on. Do this 50 times a day.. and you can see how it would increase wear to your DS and Homebrew hardware.

1 – SL1 is what you need to short on the DS to allow write access to the secured section of the DS firmware. This can be found by opening the battery compartment and removing a square sticker.

PAlib vs The World

PAlib is a “helper” library to interface with the hardware of the DS used by some developers to create homebrew. This is another factor in how people in the community interact with each other. There are two main groups. People that use PAlib, and people that hate it, and anyone that tries to use it. The third, and much smaller, group are the people that realized the library isn’t as great as it could be, but also understand why it’s there and why people choose to use it. Like I said in the beginning, I can’t program to save my life, so I use PAlib. But, most professional programmers also use “helper” libraries to interface with hardware every day of their professional careers. This is because a programmers job is to write a program, not spend the first 6 months of a project learning the ins and outs of the hardware they are going to be programming for. Not only that, but there may be someone that already knows the ins and outs of the hardware, so why reinvent the wheel? Now, does it help? Probably, but it really depends on the project. If it’s designed to run on different hardware, then learning to program for a specific piece of hardware is a waste of time. If you are just a homebrewer, with ample time on your hands, it might be fun to learn the ins and outs of the Nintendo DS and only use libnds and the DevkitPro tool chain. But, some people have lives and can’t dedicate hours of time studying the DS hardware. Now, should these people not be able to write homebrew for the DS? Of course not. Also, some people may not have any intentions of becoming professional programmers. They have no desire to learn the DS hardware, or waste time trying to. Another negative that is used is the quality of the homebrew produced using PAlib. Well, this goes two ways. Of course making something easy enough so that even I can write a homebrew game, you are going to have tons of people like me, that can’t program, writing homebrew. So, there will be a flood of really crappy homebrew that uses PAlib. But, there are also some very good homebrew games that use PAlib, because the programmer knows what they are doing and PAlib is just the interface to the DS. I believe part of the problem here is that people seem to not have a broad understanding of programming/hardware. One of the common mistakes I see is reference to the DS as embedded programming. Yes, this is true, the programming you are doing is for an embedded system. It is when they say you can or can’t do something, or that the way you are doing it is incorrect, because that isn’t how you do it on embedded systems is where I have a problem. The real statement should be something like, “That isn’t how you do it on a handheld gaming system.” See, embedded just means the system has one primary task. In the DSs case, it is to be a game console. In the case of the industrial embedded systems I work with, it is to run a hydraulic press. So, to try and say embedded system must have direct memory locations or any other nonsense is only showing lack of knowledge of embedded systems. Now, this isn’t saying the advice they are offering isn’t true. Because what they usually mean is “for the DS”, this is how you do it, instead of for embedded systems.

ndshb-com.preview-domain.com (Shameless plug)

I started ndshb-com.preview-domain.com in hopes to be able to keep up with homebrew games and apps and create a central location for downloads. It worked for about a year, but as more and more homebrew devers popped up, it became extremely hard to keep it up to date with the newest released software as well as keeping what was already on the site up to date. The one positive thing about the site is the fact that each homebrew listed has a link to the authors site, or a forum post from the author. Hopefully that is enough to help people find the latest version of the software. After Phoenix Rising and I released the SLURP proof of concept, which was a homebrew application with the sole purpose of browsing and downloading homebrew games/apps from ndshb-com.preview-domain.com. It showed the ability for an author to include “check for the latest version” code within their homebrew. Only problem was, we never finished updating ndshb-com.preview-domain.com to use the new format we were working on, nor was any of the bugs worked out of SLURP to the point it was stable enough to continue. As with most NDS homebrew projects, it fell by the wayside. But, the source was released and is available on sourceforge.net as ndshbhive. Maybe some day ndshb-com.preview-domain.com will become community driven like it was originally planned. The only person to include the ability to download the latest version of their homebrew within the homebrew is DragonMinded’s (Shaun Taylor) DS Organize. And I believe this function may have been available even before we released SLURP/NDSHBhive.

Falling out (The divide in the community)

How a proof of concept Trojan confused and split the community even more. DarkFader was known to lash out from time to time in some unusual ways. He allegedly leaked the unreleased DS emulator HyperDS, which in my opinion (which is just that, opinion, as I have not actually seen it nor the official Nintendo DS Emulator that was leaked named Ensata) HyperDS was probably just a cracked version of Ensata, which is why it was never “publicly” available. (Confirmation from DarkFader proves this information is incorrect. HyperDS was in fact a separate application and had nothing to do with the official emulator. Speculation is that FireFly didn’t release it to keep Nintendo off his back) It had been calm for a while after that when the PSP had a Trojan come out. DarkFader had mentioned on IRC that the DS could have the same thing happen. We all agreed that with most of the DS firmware unsecured, that it wouldn’t take much to create such a Trojan. But, at that time, nobody really listened, yet I continued to preach FlashMe use if for nothing more than the recovery code that was part of its installation. It was all just talk.

Open discussions like this tend to have someone step up to the plate and prove the world wrong. One example of this was if the GBA Movie Players Compact Flash interface was fast enough to run pirate romz. Everyone kept saying it just couldn’t be done. Chishm (Michel Chisholm), the provider of a GBA MP firmware hack to allow the device to run homebrew, proved everyone wrong by creating a version that would indeed play these illegal romz. But, unlike most people in the homebrew scene, he had the integrity to keep it private. He created an unlock code in it that would check against the DSs MAC address and you would put the code (Provided by Chishm, if you were one of the lucky few) at the end of your name within the DS firmware. If the code was there, it would allow you to play pirate romz. I remember the day he told me about it clearly. I logged into the gbadev.org forums and there was a private message from him. He thought I would be disappointed with him for even doing the project. He provided me with a code and I tested it out myself.. I created a video to also show that it worked with my original DS game card in the video as well. Honestly, I asked him to release it. Not because I wanted to benefit the pirate scene, but to do the exact opposite. At this time, companies like NeoFlash were getting rich ripping off pirates selling $100 in hardware for $300+ just because it could run illegal romz. I saw this as an opportunity to fight fire with fire and release something that would allow a $25 device to do the same thing these $300 devices were doing. Chishm, being a man of his word, chose not to release it and the idea died quickly. It would be one and a half years before software would be released for the GBA MP that would allow it to play illegal romz.

Anyway, DarkFader decided to create a Trojan that would devastate the homebrew community and break it into two groups. Those that thought they were better than everyone else, and those that didn’t fit into that group. Heading the main group would be StoneCypher and WinterMute (Dave Murphy). Many of us would try to stay neutral. I didn’t agree with what DarkFader did, but I also didn’t think he should be condemned from the homebrew community because of it. I took the objectionable view that he just proved that such software could in fact exist. And to be honest about the topic, I believe it is the exact reason Nintendo decided to secure the rest of the firmware to protect it against malicious software in the future. Until it was proven, people didn’t take the threat serious. It had been mentioned many times in many mediums from forums to IRC. DarkFader proved the threat was real. And what he provided was nothing compared to what could have happened. Wars within the homebrew scene were common. It would have only taken one homebrew dever with a short temper whos homebrew had a large market-share to cause devastating damage to the DS scene. It would have been easy for someone to build in a time bomb into their application without anyone even knowing it was there. At any time someone could have set it to go off when you launched their game/app and destroyed a large volume of DSs. I believe if it wasn’t for this proof of concept, Nintendo wouldn’t have secured the firmware at all and anyone without FlashMe installed running homebrew would be at risk today.

After the fall out, there were two IRC channels. #dsdev run by the “main” group, and #mellowdsdev which everyone received OP status. It was basically the complete opposite of #dsdev. People were free to speak without being talked down to or criticized for their lack of knowledge. Those of us that were trying to stay neutral were in both channels, speaking freely without issue. It wasn’t until I had a few more run ins with StoneCypher that I realized he was completely nuts. If he was a master of anything, it was his ability to twist your words into the complete opposite to what you were saying. By this time, #mellowdsdev seemed to become the StoneCypher hate channel. It was where people would go to rant about what StoneCypher just did or said to them. During one of my private conversations with StoneCypher, he began to tell me the beginning of DS homebrew and how things went down. Apparently nobody told him that I was there for it, so he began to tell me a history completely different from the truth. According to him, Kraln was the first person to build a PassMe. From the sounds of it, Kraln was the one that designed it as well. It was at this point that I decided I would no longer speak with StoneCypher.

It wasn’t long before I was banned from #dsdev for pointing out the lack of respect StoneCypher would show to others in the channel. I stayed away from them for a long time, till one day I see a post from WinterMute stating his main development machine had died. Being the maintainer of the DevkitPro toolkit that every DS homebrewer used to create their homebrew, I contacted him to see if I could purchase a new machine for him. After finding out that computers in his country cost twice as much as they do in the USA, I donated $250 toward his new machine. All of a sudden, I was a friend to him and the #dsdev channel. I was invited back by WinterMute. We had many conversations about the homebrew community and what was wrong with it. For some reason, WinterMute can’t see the damage StoneCypher, personally, has caused. I believe at this point, StoneCypher remains an OP for no more than WinterMute to believe he wasn’t wrong in keeping StoneCypher as an OP. If he de-OPed him now, it would prove that everyone else was right. And we can’t have that. It wasn’t long before #dsdev began receiving spam. Started off with ASCII art like DE-OP SC and the like to the point of posting links to IRC logs with discussions between SC and others in the channel.. With the added slant from the spammer. The real question is how can so many people be wrong, and one person be right? I would agree with WinterMute if it was just me, and maybe a handful of people that didn’t get along with StoneCypher. Personalities clash and that’s just how it is. But, if someone was to create a petition for people that had a negative experience with this guy.. it would be an extremely long list! And I’m sorry, but numbers don’t lie. I just can’t grasp the concept of how it’s found “OK” to disrespect everyone on a regular basis, and I’m the bad guy for pointing this out.

It’s been a long time since I was in #dsdev, and from what I hear, StoneCyphers antics havn’t changed. He’s still throwing his weight around like a sumo wrestler. The last time I was banned from #dsdev, I said a single word. “Nice”. In reference to yet another conversation where StoneCypher decided to act like a child and start calling others names. It seems that “side” found his behaviour acceptable, where I did not. To be honest, I am very happy that I’m banned from the channel. I really like to be without the drama. It’s really nice.. But, you won’t know till you are banned.. or just quit..

Piracy and NeoFlash vs DarkFader

Normally, I wouldn’t even mention this stuff because I don’t really care about it. But, there is a direct relationship between homebrewing and piracy. If it wasn’t for piracy, no manufacturer would invest the time and money into a product that is directed at such a small audience as the homebrew community. The return on investment would be to small, take to long, at to high of a risk. Without manufacturers making their devices for piracy, we’d still be using a PassMe1/2 for NDS homebrew, and if we were lucky, we would either have had to buy a home built flash cart that cost even more than the commercial carts, or even worse, build one ourselves from information listed on a web site someplace.

Now, because I watched most of this go down on IRC, I figured I would tell a little about what I saw. All of this is rumor. None of it is backed up with any facts. This is just my interpretation of what may have caused the events as they happened. Being that NeoFlash was the innovator of the NDS piracy scene, they quickly hired on DarkFader to do their dirty work. As with most commercial companies in the scene, it didn’t seem like they had any technical skill at all. Everything produced commercially seemed to have been created by a homebrewer for hire, or just directly stolen from them without their permission. Being that DarkFader was the first to dump a DS game, he would be the obvious one to take on any tasks of creating a system that would only allow these pirate romz to be played on their hardware. So, being that NeoFlash wasn’t really developing anything new, they just borrowed hardware that was already available. But, what they did was create a “team” called Golden Sun Team (GST) to dump roms and patch them to only work on their hardware. Their hardware being the XG Flash cart with a new label and a commercial version of the PassMe. It wasn’t long before people realized this and the XG manufacturer changed the new hardware to be just different enough so that these GST romz would no longer work on XG labeled hardware. It wasn’t long before a new “team” would emerge. This time, called Silver Moon Team (SMT) and they would release a commercial rom dumper to the public. Up until then, only GST could dump and release a rom that would only work on NeoFlash hardware. But, to play it “cool”, these new dumps using the SMT dumper would be useless, as there was still nothing other than the NeoFlash hardware to play these illegal romz. But, being that everyone was able to dump romz, it would allow GST to concentrate on patching these romz and to allow their catalog to grow at an uncontrollable rate increasing the appeal of paying $300+ for the hardware. See, it’s hard to sell a $300 item that can only play $80 (2 games) worth of stolen software. But, of course, it wouldn’t be long before these illegal romz would be playable on other hardware. One day, DarkFader would be hated by NeoFlash. I connected to the #neoflash IRC channel to see a DarkFader hate message as the channel topic. DarkFader had turned on NeoFlash and released a patcher that would allow anyone with a GBA Flash Cart to play these released pirate romz. Err.. I mean, SMT would release a patcher that would allow anyone with a GBA Flash Cart to play these released pirate romz. 😉

Now, with the illegal romz community booming, it would lead to commercial companies producing products that would allow more people to get into homebrew. So much to the point that Datel would create the “Game Construction Kit” which would later become the “Games N Music” when it hit the store shelves in a major retailer near you. At this point, you can walk out of a local Walmart after spending $20 + tax and run homebrew on your DS. The product is a little slow, will not play illegal romz, and is a perfect “get your feet wet” device to see if homebrew is something you are interested in without spending a lot of money.


Final Thoughts

Hopefully after reading all of this, you will have a little more information on the background of DS homebrew. Where it is going is up to you.