For those of you too lazy to watch the video (you know who you are…), it shows me booting into redNAND mode on 7.1 from 4.2 (works on 4.1-4.5 ofc) and running a homebrew game contained within its own little channel, complete with custom icon and banner. It also gives some other stuff.

This video is a glimpse at what I want for the up and coming 3DS homebrew scene, ie a way for people to make their own homebrew applications and install so that they’re directly accessible from home menu. This has a number of advantages over running code “on the bare metal” as some are already doing. For one thing, it means that homebrew code will be strictly limited to user mode code, the same way commercial games and applications are, which drastically lowers the likelihood of anyone’s (*cough*GW*cough*) code accidentally bricking your console. For another, it means that our code will be able to interface with every service provided by the 3DS’s OS; it’ll make stuff like FS, wifi and GPU access much easier. And of course, it just looks cool having your own channel in the menu, and being able to return to menu and switch between games instantly is a nice plus.

For that goal to become a reality, we basically need two things : a way to create new channels and a way to install them. I’m proud to say that I’m taking steps to make creating channels possible, by starting ctrulib (whose code is freely available on github). The idea is to make interfacing with 3DS services easier, by providing functions designed to do so and example code to understand how they’re used. Of course it’s not much at the moment; very few services are implemented and the examples don’t necessarily use them in exactly the way they were meant to be used. Nevertheless, it already provides the basics; enough to do basic interactions with NS, the HID module for user input and the GSP module for VRAM and later on GPU access. It’s very much a work in progress and will only keep growing. yeti3DS is an example of what can be achieved with ctrulib at the moment; not much, but a pretty cool start if you ask me. yeti3DS’s code is also available on github.

Now the thing is, there is at the moment no public way to install new channels, which means that even though you can just clone the ctrulib repo right now and compile it, you probably won’t be able to run what it produces. The reason for that is, basically, that I don’t have an installer ready. That’s the next big step for me and I’ll have to ask you to be patient. There is a fair bit of work involved and while I do expect to have an installer POC ready within the next couple weeks, there’s no telling how long it’ll take to get a safe package ready for mass consumption; users have already suffered through enough bricks, I’d rather my software didn’t add to the list.

So sit tight ! We’ll have nice 3DS homebrew soon enough. Feel free to ask any questions you may have (other than ETA requests), I’m not sure how clear this post was. (I’m pretty tired…)

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Parablank said:

4.5 only again? ;-;

I shouldn't have updated for Miiverse

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