A few hours ago hacker YifanLu released Cosmo3DS, a barebone 3DS Custom Firmware that ships with emuNAND and allows the user to switch their 3DS region at will. It also gives the user access to any region’s eShop.

Specifically, Cosmo3DS matches the following requirements from YifanLu:

• Keep my 3DS on the hackable 9.2 firmware but still use the latest system software (emuNAND)
• Play games region free right from the home menu
• Change the system region without possibly bricking the device
• Use the eShop with region changed systems

Yifanlu emphasizes that this Customer firmware does not enable piracy, but that’s not the interesting part of this relase:

Cosmo3DS is built on top of the concept that YifanLu introduced recently about a “cleaner” way of writing Custom Firmwares for the 3DS. Yifanlu claims (and basically demonstrates in his articles) that 3DS Custom Firmwares today are written in an inefficient way. They use resources, and make further modding difficult.

Cosmo3DS is built around an entirely rewritten “Loader”, which handles code injection on the 3DS in a much more clean, centralized and controlled way. I’ll let you read Yifan’s article for details. What this means to the end user though is that Cosmo3DS could be the base for much more moddable Custom Firmware in the future. Cleaner code could lead to more customizations for your 3DS. Yifanlu mentions the possibility to see a “homebrew” button in the menu, custom keyboards, or more advanced custom themes.

I believe that using a custom “loader” will make it much easier to write mods for the 3DS. We could see hacks such as a “Homebrew” button in the Home Menu or custom keyboards or custom themes outside of what Nintendo officially supports. We might also see hacks for games similar to HANS but without requiring access to a dump of the game. I hope 3DS developers will pick up on this and make cool mods and hacks for the system.

Having been on the console scene for 10 years now, I can relate to Yifan’s observation about the quality of the code in homebrew in general. The hacking scene is made of people with many skills, and not all of us have a degree in software engineering. For those of us with a computer science background, the lack of quality can be a bit frustrating, and I think this is where Yifanlu is coming from. Back in the days, I’ve worked on PSP hacks with people who cared more about their variable naming conventions than a good long term design to make the project maintainable and scalable. This was annoying (and I believe the other dude was frustrated too to be honest. It’s not always easy working on software projects with people from various backgrounds)

On the PSP scene, there used to be a great resource for people looking to collaborate on hacks and build clean stuff (ps2dev.org, now dead). I’m not exactly sure why and how things went so well there, but the people who drove the tech discussions on the PSP back then were building really clean stuff (the PSP SDK comes to mind). It seems to me modern console scenes are having a hard time reaching that level of quality. But maybe I’m just not seeing it. Either way, here’s to YifanLu’s new CFW, and hoping this will bring good news to the scene moving forward!

Download Cosmo3DS

You can Download Cosmo3DS from YifanLu’s github. There’s no end-user “easy” installation process at this point so follow the instructions below if you feel inclined to:

If you want to use it, you need the CFW as well as the custom loader. Then, the important part is injecting the custom loader into the right FIRM file. (If you search for “reinand 3.1 firmware.bin pastebin” you should be able to find it)

Source: YifanLu on twitter