DS Special Homebrew Menu by devKitPRO

Well, it's know by most NintendoDS owners that the available flashcards are capable of running both homebrew applications and videogame backups. Also, the main conflict between Nintendo and the flashcard manufacturers is that the backups are always related to piracy.

This war has arrived at the point of Nintendo beginning to block those flashcards, so the homebrew software can be avoided. Because of that, the devKitPRO and libnds teams released this year 2010 a special Homebrew Menu, that is, a simple launcher intended to support DS homebrew developers and their users which has no means to run commercial games: only homebrew. This is my own DSi running this hbmenu.

This Homebrew Menu, or hbmenu, will be really necessary for the homebrew applications developed by using the 1.4.x versions of libnds that are taking advantage of the recently innovative embedded filesystem to store media data, called nitroFS. This filesystem will be focused in future posts, since my RPG project, Shades of Oblivion, will use it.

In the following link, http://wiki.devkitpro.org/index.php/Homebrew_Menu, there is the main documentation about it, as well as the download links for the menu binaries ---specially designed for EZFlash V(i), Acekard 2(i) and DSTT(i) cards--- to be placed instead of the flashcard own menu launchers. However, the best option in my opinion is to use the _BOOT_DS.NDS file as a normal rom, entitled hbmenu.nds for instance.

However, the main intention of hbmenu is to be a boot menu for flashcards, and I have found some problems to run Homebrew Menu in my EZFlashVi for this task:

• kernel 2.0 RC16,
• firmware version 14,
• hardware version 705

and this is provoqued by the DLDI patching of the v2.0 of the kernel (that is, the file EZ5V2.dldi used to sign the ez5sys.bin executable): a "FAT init failed!" message appears. I have finally solved the problem by following these steps:

1. download the source code of Homebrew Menu; it can be downloaded from http://devkitpro.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/devkitpro/trunk/projects/nds/HomebrewMenu/, since this is released as an open source application.
2. overwrite the EZ5V2.dldi file with the proper kernel 1.9 openbeta 11 dldi file: ez5s.dldi or ez5sdhc.dldi.
3. open a text terminal, go to the main folder of hbmenu and type make dist. After that, the included files in the folder called hbmenu will contain the same files that the ordinary distributed binaries but now the ez5sys.bin file will work.

With this, now the EZFlashV(i) will boot with the hbmenu. Nevertheless, there is also the option of use this homebrew menu as a homebrew bridge between the flashcard menu and the homebrew application itself.