Hacker News Reader

Comment by delroth | Hacker News Reader

Yeah right. The homebrew scene on 3DS was literally kickstarted by piggy-backing on a special cartridge made exclusively for piracy purpose (which was exploiting a 3DS firmware vulnerability). People developed the exploits for piracy first then the homebrew developers came. The first few homebrew software for 3DS were shipped as modified "launcher.dat" files for Gateway 3DS.

This shifted later on in the console's lifetime, but at that point people had already developed "backup loaders" and most users were already in for the piracy more than the homebrew.

Not that homebrew isn't great, but it would be a complete lie to say piracy isn't the biggest application of these exploits.

View on HN

See, if Nintendo had provided a simple way for developers to play around in their own consoles (as simple as "the 3DS will run files that are signed by you, in its regular sandbox; we provide no support for this feature") we likely wouldn't have seen the newest ground-leveling exploits.

Say what you will about the piracy scene, but Nintendo almost killed it with the newest software updates. It took passion and experience, not money, to cause the newest events of what happened here. What if that passion could have been redirected into cool homebrew in the first place?

I'd argue that 3DS piracy would have continued even if Nintendo opened up for homebrew. There's money to be made off of it - if there weren't, the initial exploit with a special cartridge wouldn't have been developed.

On a sidenote, do companies in general want to allow home brew on game consoles? Especially if they're selling them at a loss or at break-even, since they're not going to make money if people buy the consoles just for homebrew purposes.

you miss the point that the pirating devices only come to existence because of the homebrew hackers.

How did the homebrew hackers help in the creation of the Gateway 3DS?

They provide camoflauge. If homebrew did not exist, such products could be uncontroversially classified as piracy tools, allowing Nintendo to aggressively remove them from the market. Instead they are in a bittorrent-like situation where even though the vast majority of the use is for copyright infringing activity, there is a loud minority that use it for something legal, and all the pirates pretend to be in that minority when accused of breaking the law.

This culture of "homebrew" truly blossomed during the DS era with a huge number of commercially produced rewriteable cartridges, and 3DS piracy is largely a continuation of that.

> On a sidenote, do companies in general want to allow home brew on game consoles? Especially if they're selling them at a loss or at break-even, since they're not going to make money if people buy the consoles just for homebrew purposes.

The PS3 had this issue when the US Air Force built a super computer out of them a while back[1], since you could run Linux on the original PS3 without a jailbreak. They latter pushed an update that disable this feature in response.

[1]: http://phys.org/news/2010-12-air-playstation-3s-supercompute...

It wasn't in response to that. In fact it was pretty good publicity.

The PS3 supported installing Linux onto it and there were people internally supporting it.

Yellow Dog Linux was the officialish distro: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_Dog_Linux

What's more likely is that once Geohot and others started hacking the machine, sometimes through linux. Someone at Sony must have realised that it's an attack vector that a miniscule amount of users used.

And it'd be better for them to get rid of the functionality.

> What's more likely is that once Geohot and others started hacking the machine, sometimes through linux. Someone at Sony must have realised that it's an attack vector that a miniscule amount of users used.

> And it'd be better for them to get rid of the functionality.

On the other hand: The people who love to hack Linux to run on their toaster are often the people who have the knowledge to exploit the device. As long as Linux already ran from beginning on, this kind of people had no real incentive to attack the device to run Linux. As soon as this option was removed, this kind of community got furious on Sony and decided to let their exploits loose.

Sony didn't let OtherOS use the GPU proper (it only let you use a basic frame buffer) so there was already incentive to attack the device to expose more capabilities.

>do companies in general want to allow home brew on game consoles

Nintendo generally seem to be very anti-homebrew/community lately, using the DMCA to shut down fan projects seems to be their way of destroying that reputation that they built over the 90s.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com