Gameboy Genius

Nintendo DSi update (256 MB internal flash+it’s now hacked)

November 7th, 2008

The 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.

Follow the discussion on the GBATemp forum

Posted in Nintendo DS | 5 Comments »

Amazing spray painter

November 6th, 2008

Super Sprayer on metacafe

Amazing technique. I saw a painter using similar techniques in Greece once, but sadly I didn’t buy a piece from him.

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Electronic components (Pictures)

November 2nd, 2008

Before my local shop electronic components, Labb Elektronik, (RIP) shut down, they gave away free bags with random stuff. These pictures are the result of sorting the components in these bags. Most of it is pretty useless for what I want to do, apart from building tube circuitry, where the capacitors and high wattage resistors might be useful. But some of the things are pure eye candy!

Each picture has a title attribute - hover an image to see a tooltip, or click it to go to its flickr page.

Posted in art, electronics | 4 Comments »

Breaking the limits of the SID

October 31st, 2008

I couldn’t believe my ears when I heard this, but someone calling himself Fanta has managed to play a full 4 channel mod - along with 2 SID voices with filters on a standard C64 with a standard SID. The track is called Fanta in Space and apart from being technically impressive, it’s pretty catchy.

Listen:
Download

CSDb entry for Fanta in Space

Through True Chip Till Death

Posted in music | 1 Comment »

21:42 <+Tristendo> I am starting a new genre core beat beast mode
21:42 < nitro2k01> core beat beast mode?
21:43 <+Tristendo> its basicly r&b

DS Brut - Nintendo DS hardware interface

October 28th, 2008

DS Brut is a slot 1 DS card with a number of interface pins (UART TX/RX pins, plus 5 general purpose pins) It can be used for things like hardware sensors (Light, temperature or maybe accelerometers) or communicating with external devices. But more interesting is the possibility to send and receive MIDI or perhaps even synchronize DS music software with LSDj or Nanoloop by emulating the original Gameboy serial protocol. Neither is possible yet, but the DS Brut is completely open source, including the firmware for the onboard Atmega 168 microcontroller, which means that it can be implemented with a little effort.

So, what are the pros and cons with this device? The big pro is the price tag - 26 euros for a DS hardware interface that can do virtually anything is really great. (There’s also a UART only version for 19 euros.)

The only real con I can see with this device is that it has no onboard memory. This means that unless you have a custom firmware and a slot 2 backup device, you’ll have to do cartridge swapping to use DS Brut. I imagine that in the long run, the cartridge swapping will wear out the interface pins and cause loose contacts. I’m not asking for the DS Brut to be a replacement for my M3 card, but for the next revision I’d like to see a few kilobytes of memory that can hold a small bootstrap to start code from a GBA cart or elsewhere. A couple of unused pins on the microcontroller could easily have been connected to the relevant pins on the Slot 1 bus to keep the door open for adding a bootstrap in a future revision of the firmware.

Apart from this minor remark, DS Brut is a promising piece of hardware that opens up many interesting possibilities, including sending and receiving true MIDI.

Link: DS Brut

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »