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Pictures from inside the DSi
November 9th, 2008
There have been a lot of posts about Nintendo’s new handheld the DSi on my blog lately, because I’m following the unveiling of information about it closely. This link is one day old, which is ancient in this context.
Bunnie:studios has opened his (her?) DSi and commented the guts. I especially like the comment “Mainboard backside photo — love the detailed, plain-English “hack here please” silkscreen annotation”
The CPU is unmarked. (It only says ARM 2007) While Bunnie speculates that the clock could be in the range of 266-533 MHz, I as the cynical/pessimist I am still guessing it’s the same 66 MHz ARM9 as in the original DS’s. I’ll gladly be proven wrong though. Decipher the marking on the clock crystal. Measure the clock with an oscilloscope/other equipment. Hack it and run some sort of BogoMIPS routine. Anything! Just prove me wrong, and I’ll be a much happier guy. 
Time will tell, I suppose.
Anyway, Bunnie’s blog seems pretty interesting, so I’ve subscribed to it. I’m hoping to see more of the “Name that Ware” segment, and perhaps a little more on the trip to Japan?
New DSi hack video from Yasu!
November 9th, 2008
Just a few days after his first video of a simple “Hello world” program running on the DSi, Yasu posted a video of the DSi running his own Beatmania-like software BMDS. Still no clues of how he did it though. 
Source: http://home.usay.jp/pc/etc/nds/
(The video wasn’t available on youtube, only in mpg from his site, so I uploaded it.)
Nintendo DSi update (256 MB internal flash+it’s now hacked)
November 7th, 2008The Nintendo DSi is out in Japan, and except for what was already known, here’s the latest news:
1) It has a 256 MB internal flash storage. It was known before that it has internal memory, but not how much. This memory is presumably meant for storing items purchased in the new Nintendo shop.
2) Nintendo has upped the security when it comes to running homebrew. Homebrew on the original DS/DSLite was shamelessly easy to do by using the many existing flash cards available on the market. Here’s a video of someone trying practically every flash/pass card on the market, and all fail. So far it is unknown whether these devices have been blacklisted or if there’s a whitelist of all existing games in the firmware. This will probably be discovered later. There are two different ways the cards are failing a) by producing an error message (So far only available in Japanese. Is there a translation of this message?) b) and more curiously, some cards don’t appear at all in the menu (As if there’s no card in the slot)
3) A small update is that the DSi has support for WPA encryption for WiFi. WPA works only for new DSi games, though.
4) The biggest news is that just 3 days after the release, Japanese hacker Yasu has managed to run unsigned code on the DSi. There has been some speculation which method he has used. He’s not telling, but hes saying that it is the method that everybody was atalking about. The consensus on the scene seems to be that it is a buffer overflow TIFF exploit. The TIFF image format seems to be a goldmine for buffer overflow attacks. There are already TIFF exploits for the iPhone/iPod Touch and PSP, and just recently a TIFF exploit for the PS3 was found.
I have another idea. What if he used a savestate exploit for an old DS game… Since old DS games will still boot normally, that should be a fully possible way, given that you manage to find a savestate exploit in the first place, of course. Even if that’s not what he was using, I think people should be looking for them. I think savestate epxloits have been widely overlooked because of the availability of flash cards. However, a rumour (although unconfirmed) tells me that classic DS games running on a DSi will run in a restricted environment.
Anyway, here’s Yasu’s video of his exploit.
Nintendo announces DSi, the next generation NDS
October 2nd, 2008
Today Nintendo announced the new DSi, the next generation of thei DS line of handheld gaming consoles. Well, not exacly the next generation, but the next version. Looking at the specs, the DSi is to the DS what the GBC is to the DMG.(The original 1989 version of Gameboy) A spiced up version, but still basically the same thing. This is good in that games can have a smooth transistion between version 1 and 2, but because it means the hardware is still as weak performance-wise as it was in the first DS.
So let’s have a look at the specs. The information comes from Joystiq.
- CPU power - Unchanged. Period. Unless Joystiq have received too early info and it sports some kind of turbo mode à la GBC, this is a disappointment.
- Graphics - Unchanged. Two 256*192 screens of which one is (still) a touch screen. The rumours of the DSi having dual touch screens seem to be proven wrong too. At best the screens are a little brighter and have a little more contrast than the DSLite, and the screens are a little bit bigger, even though that’s not a real killer. (The DSlite had a pretty good display)
- Cameras - Here we go… The DSi has not one, but two cameras. One high-res on the back (Presumably) and one low-res on the hinge consequently. Seeing that they’re targetting girls, judging from their video, it’s not surprising that they’re trying to break into a market that has been dominated by cell phones in Japan for the last few years. But will they succeed? Future will tell. They promise video chat, but I suspect the CPU is a bit too slow to cope with simultaneous compression and decompression of video and audio data. Just saying.
There’s also a camera app with a few warp effects and other meaningless things. - Wi-Fi - Joystiq’s comparison just says Wi-Fi, but let’s just hope they upgraded the wireless card to one with 11g instead of just 11b, and that they implemented hardware support for WPA. As of today, WPA is probably possible, but would eat up all CPU power, leaving nothing to the actual application. (Not cool!)
- The GBA slot is gone - This was an anticipated change. Seeing that it was only really used by Guitar Hero, Opera (The browser) and backup devices, I can see why they want it gone, since removing it also allowed for a slightly slimmer form factor. We’ll have to live without Guitar Hero, we’ll get a new browser for free, and N wants us to stop pirating and using homebrew. All is as it should.
- Storage - Here’s something that’s interesting for me, since I’m mainly interested in homebrew. 1) Nintendo is promising onboard storage. They’re not saying how much, but hopefully more than the current 256 kB firmware area. 2) A built in SD slot! I mean wow, here’s a great ptoential for a new kind of cheap passcards. The danger with that is that N will come with a firmware upgrade that breaks the compatibility with said devices, and since they wouldn’t be upgradeable. (Since in my little fantasy that’s what’s going to make them cheap in the first place) But yeah, I’m excited about the SD slot actually. Might be the killer feature for homebrewers, although my M3Real already has an SD slot that works perfectly fine.
- App Store - To make the onboard storage useful, they’ve added an App Store, much like the Wii Shop Channnel. In fact they renamed the Wii Points to Nintendo Points just honour this new feature.
- Music player - An MP3 player, possibly with the possibility to buy music online.
- On a more superficial level… I’m also noticing that they re-arranged the LEDs a bit. They’re now on the left side rather than on the right side. The power LED changed from green to the evr so popular blue, and wireless activity has now got it’s own dedicated, yellow LED.
So, in essence, all new known hardware features are the cameras and the SD slot. It will sell, I am sure of it, but with its under-powered hardware, will it last?
Through: Engadget, Joystiq
Official Nintendo DSi homepage (Japanese)
For the G-Bot: New Gameboy 2008
New NitroTracker tune: Mysrysare
September 27th, 2008
NitroTracker is an FT2 style music tracker for the Nintendo DS. Download it by clicking the image above.
Say hello to a new, although crappy and slightly unfinished NitroTracker song, Mysrysare!
Listen on 8bitcollective
Download the .XM Please, only play the XM in NitroTracker, since the volume envelopes will be fucked up in other players.
Made for sybi0t’s NitroTracker compilation.
NitroTracker 0.4 is released!
July 10th, 2008<3 <3 <3
The long wait is over! Finally, NitroTracker v0.4 by 0xtob has been released to the public! I’ve been beta testing it for a while and helped iron out some wrinkles. It has a bunch of new features, like envelopes, sample panning and volume column editing, and a lot of small bug fixes.
Gogogogo and grab it, and get yourself a good chip samplepack to get started with!
Essential NitroTracker sample pack (chip waveforms)
July 5th, 2008Here’s a bunch of loopable samples of essential chip sounds (Square, PWM, sawtooth, triangle, sine wave+a couple of variations) Works on NitroTracker or any other tracker that supports .wav samples.
The Quest For Red Diamond (NitroTracker song)
June 15th, 2008<3 <3 <3
I present to you my first XM created with NitroTracker, called The Quest For Red Diamond. It’s a remake of an LSDj tune but it ended becoming a whole new song. It consists almost solely of samples that I’ve synthesized myself. (The hi-hat and snare were taken from som kit, the rest is by me)
Download the XM (For NitroTracker)
Listen to the song on 8bitcollective (MP3)
I recommend you to only play the XM in NitroTracker. NT’s volume envelopes are a bit different from those of regular XM players, so some of the instruments will sound a bit tacky if played with anything but NitroTracker.
Now I’m just hoping for some feature requests for NitroTracker to come true, mainly stereo playback.
Oh, NitroTracker isn’t related to me, but got it’s name from the code name for Nintendo DS, which was Nitro. ou can still see a trace of this in that the model number for the original NDS is NTR-001.
GlitchDS Sample Pack: The Sounds of Mortima T #1 (Universe)
May 28th, 2008Here’s my first sample pack for the really cool up and coming DS homebrew music/sound app DSGlitch. It’s a sequencer and sound glitcher based on John Conway’s Game of Life where each position in the grid can trigger one out of six samples.
The sound is kind of random and I like it so much that I’m planning to make a concept album with sounds processed by the program, with the corresponding sample pack to go with it. (I’m making some tight ass samples for it!)
Until then, I’m going to release a number of sample packs based on the incredibly jazzy and moody sounds of Mortimer Twang’s Amiga mods. More packs coming when I feel like it!
Watcha waiting for?
First grab a copy of GlitchDS for your Nintendo DS
Then grab the Mortima T samplepack
Update: To the best of my knowledge, here’s the first track using samples from the pack: Just For Her by Litebritedeath
.txt:
The Sounds of Mortima Tee
=========================
what: sample pack
for: glitchds
samples from: universe.mod (#1)
this is the first in a series of sample packs
based on the ameega mods by sweet fatha mortima
twang. The sounds were exported as played in the
mod, sliced when necessary and given minor edits
this first pack contains samples from universe,
a moody downtempo mod with a nice vintage sound
consisting of beautiful strings and a bass line
made with a double bass sample
these packs will be made in respect to mortima's
moody, jazzy, trippy, groovy sounds. to listen
to the original mods, pay this website a visit
http://www.mono211.com/modsoulbrother/mt.html
original sounds by mortimer
twang aka lukas nystrand
compiled by: nitro2k01
This sample pack is licensed with the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license. It gives you the right to share and remix the work if the resulting work is non-commercial and attribution is given to the original creator. (That is, Mortimer Twang!)
Two videos of Protein DScratch
March 2nd, 2008Here are two videos of me playing around with Protein DSratch, a sampler and scratch software for Nintendo DS. Click the link for downloads.
