Today is Christmas Eve and developers in all major homebrew scenes seem to be feeling the spirit. Today already saw a massive announcement by TheFloW and now Smealum over on the 3DS scene has decided to release the beta version of the next *hax payloads.

The most notable change is this new version of *hax is the addition of a PASLR bypass. For those who don’t know what PASLR is, it’s the algorithm added by Nintendo on 3DS update 11.0 to make *hax entry-points less reliable. PASLR is another type of ASLR, better known as “Address space layout randomization” in which the “P” in this case stands for “physical”. In layman’s terms, ASLR is a feature in the code that makes it consistently and randomly rearrange itself to protect the code from buffer overflow attacks. This is how developer ShinyQuagsire explained it about a month ago on Reddit:

The other notable change in *hax 2.8 beta is an update to HANS that in theory should allow o3DS users to run Pokémon Sun/Moon romhacks. Smealum states that while it should work in theory, there is a possibility that the game will fail to load due to low memory. That could be fixed further on but nothing concrete is set in stone as of now.

Update your payload to *hax 2.8 Beta

To update your *hax payload in case you aren’t running a CFW, just head on over to Smealum’s website and choose the appropriate game for you.

Remember that if you are doing this for the first time you need to set-up files on your memory card beforehand:

In order for homebrew to run on your system, you will need to place a few files on your SD card :

• boot.3dsx : this file should be placed at the root of your SD card. It’s what ninjhax/ironhax/tubehax/whateverhax will run first! Usually, this is the Homebrew Launcher.
• 3ds/ : this folder will contain all the homebrew applications you want to install to your system. You can either place 3DSX files directly inside of that folder, or create an individual folder for each application you install.

To make things easier, we put together the homebrew starter kit; you can just download it and extract it at the root of your SD card. Alternatively, you may choose to only download The Homebrew Launcher menu executable and place it at the root of your SD card.
No matter what, you should have a file named boot.3dsx placed at the root of your SD card

Smealum urges everyone to remember that this is a beta. He states that in theory everything should work correctly, but there will be bugs. He also states that he has only “tested this on ninjhax 9.2 and 11.2 (o3ds and n3ds) and steelhax 11.2 (n3ds only, and had to run installer from hax 2.8)”.

Enjoy the release Homebrew Launcher users!