iPhone upgrade, DSi hacking and compiling the Homebrew Menu my way
I should explain that title a little before continuing I’ve just had my times at work changed so that I’m now free on weekends so I’ve got 2 straight days now to get back into the hacking business and trying to document everything I’ve worked on in the past is my first goal. The other goal is to hack around with the code from the HomebrewMenu (it’s a project on the svn server for devkitPro) to make it a little more interesting than the current bland list of text.
iPhone upgrade
I’ve just upgraded my old Nokia 6500 slide to a nice and shiny iPhone 3gs (expecting apple to release v4 of the iphone hardware within the next couple of months now). It’s a nice phone (I’ve not used it to make calls yet) and the apps look good (why did I purchase Space Miner: Space Ore Bust????) but I can’t code for it as I’ve not got a Mac, and with my views on piracy being what they are I’m now saving up for a Mac mini (I don’t need a monitor, I’ve got 2 on my desk right now). I might start hacking stuff for the Mac at some point.
DSi Hacking projects
Well since the DSi came out last year (it’s nearly 1 year old in the UK), I’ve been involved in a couple of projects to attempt to break the DSi open for home brewer’s to use so that we don’t need to use one of those slot-1 carts (like the R4i, AceKard 2i, or EzFlash Vi). The main focus I had was the FlipNote application as it can load and save to the SD card slot. Unfortunately I got some docs and test code wrote but nothing came from the little hacking I did due to the limited knowledge I have on the actual hardware implementation of the encryption routines that the DSi has. I have since learnt a little and one thing that stopped me was the last 144 bytes of the file looking like a load of garbage, in fact it was a 128 byte signature for the file, think of it as a 1024 bit CRC check, except it seems to be using some form of AES to generate it. I’m still going to try and break it, but I need to learn how AES works in this situation, which is a long project I think.
Other DSi hacking that I’ve been attempting to do is to use WinterMute’s cooking coach hack to put an image on the top screen of the DS. All goes well as long as I do not attempt to put the code on an actual cooking coach cart, when I do that I get a blank screen, I’ve got no idea what the hells going on there. I’ve spoken to WinterMute about it to see if he can spot the problem, but he’s a little busy attempting to find some random bugs in the next release of devkitARM (r28).
Homebrew Menu
Well I’m using an old version of the homebrew menu that is on the svn servers for devkitPro, and I’ve modified it to use my font library instead of the default console. All well and good until a few people on the devkitPro forums started experiencing some issues with the latest download from the server. So I’ve setup a new local copy of the project and I’m going to get this working using the minimum of changes as I have a feeling that WinterMute is doing something with it (last update was 13 hours ago according to the server logs). This should also be a good time to learn the correct use of SVN for my own projects (including my failed EMS application). I’ll document any changes I make so that it should not hinder me if/when it’s updated again.
Hopes for the future
I’m still hoping that Nintendo will allow us home brewers to create some form of application launcher for the DSi that is controlled by WinterMute to stop the pirates of the world working out a way to boot commercial rom images.