(I’m new to the blogging ‘thing’, but I hope you enjoy my style of ‘it’)

I have seen recently that many of you guys have been wanting to hear more news about the 3DS so I’m here to save the day, if I can. As we all know, just under a year ago, a firm named ‘Gateway 3DS’ has released their newest instalment of what I like to call ‘Piracy openers’ since the word ‘hax’ has been overused in most of the 3DS ‘userland exploits’.

What are ‘Piracy openers’ / 3DS Flashcarts?

They are a device that open up the possibility to the system using a built in SD card reader and specialized software combined with a low power processing unit and some other parts, the flashcart can achieve loading 3DS homebrew by bypassing the security that Nintendo has put into the 3DS. This works by creating a whole new system called ‘EmuNand’. When you are setting it up, you are essentially copying your normal ‘SysNand’ from the hardware of your 3DS to an SD card. When you are using emunand, you are essentially using an emulated version of the 3DS OS to bypass updates, bypass security and also to redirect all info of the ‘Sysnand’ to the ‘Emunand’.

This makes the option of keeping the 3DS (SysNand) on a lower firmware which as we know is very important for many vulnerabilities which might have not been patched on the firmware that you are using currently, and it also means that if you seriously screw up installing a .CIA file on your SysNand, you are just able to reset it without your 3DS becoming a brick.

(There are many free alternatives to Gateway 3ds, but some people like I prefer to use the cart because of the game loading features)

What are user-land exploits?

The ‘User-land’ is what the name suggests, it is normally what games and applications that run on the 3ds have access to. Comparing this to the Vita would be very simple, as the recent Rejuvenate exploit for the Vita is ‘User-land’ where you only have access to a certain amount of processing power or memory (Sometimes you can access all of it). User-land exploits are very famous as they are normally the gateway to bigger exploits, but at this moment in time, the 3DS has over 4 different user-land exploits, and they all have the same restrictions.

However, the main difference with the newest exploits, is that we do not have access to dynarec, this means that a lot of software and homebrew will run really slow compared to a 3ds with firmware under 9.2. The biggest examples are GBA emulators, they can run, but they stutter and some games are too slow and no one likes that. But going back to the topic, user-land exploits are used to run basic homebrew and different utilities and do not allow piracy as they do not have access to essential parts of the system.

What are ‘kernel exploits’

If you have a kernel exploit, you have hit a jackpot, this is probably the furthest you would want to go to with the 3DS. But if you want to find one, it would not be easy. You would have to find two different exploits for the processors that are on the 3DS, after this you would need to find a way to make everything work together. In comparison of how hard this could be, think of trying to access a computer on the other side of the world without knowing any details, no IP address, nothing to point you in the right direction. This can be an example, but as with any piece of code or hardware, you can always reverse it, or reverse engineer it to find the clues you would want to point you in the right direction.

Essentially Kernel exploits allow access to the whole OS, from this point onwards, you can do pretty much anything you want with your 3DS. Although some users may want more, such as access to the boot loader, but that would be useless in the eyes of many. The casual user would most likely be perfectly fine with having just a way to modify the system

What is currently happening with the 3DS?

At the moment, the 3DS is at stagnation point, where we do not know if people are creating things for it or if they are just selling people lies [note from wololo: the bloggers opinion does not necessarily reflect mine. I would not call the *hax exploits a stagnation at all!]. All we know at the moment is that there are a couple of exploits floating around for the processors, but we need much more than that (I’m not going into detail because firstly I do not know the full process and secondly, if I were to write it, the article would have to be split into a couple of pages).

But overall right now, everyone is advised to stay at a firmware where one of the currently available ‘hax’ can be used, this includes TubeHax, MenuHax, and all the other hax released by smea and yellow8.

What should I/You do, to have access to anything at all?

Right now, all you can do is wait, unless you are interested in actually helping other users finding ‘exploits’ or anything at all. It is all mostly team effort, the more each of us would be able to input, the easier it would be for the ‘higher ups’ to make something amazing. But as many of us do not have the time because of work or other reasons, all we can do it wait, and donate to the people who we know are legitimately working on entry points, or different methods of getting access to the 3DS.

If you do want to donate to people like Yifanlu, smea, and all the other developers, you can mostly find their donations links by asking on their twitters or by looking at the websites that they own. I would strongly suggest donating as mostly everyone who makes ‘hax’ or any gateways into running homebrew on consoles, do it out of their own time, money and interest and knowledge.
That’s it from me, I hope the style that I use is appealing to everyone, and I hope that at least some people got some new information or learned something new from this!