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If you are interested in this kind of stuff, or you arrived after the scene had unfolded and would like to know what went on in the early stages go ahead and spend a few minutes reading this over.

 

“The PassMe

When I arrived on the scene, there were about 6 people with expensive FPGA devkits that were able to run DS homebrew. DarkFader (Rafael Vuijk) was the first person to show the DS running hacked code where he had changed the text within Metroid Prime Demo. I was lucky enough to step into the middle of the PassMe design stage and received a copy of the printed circuit board (PCB) layout from Natrium42 (Alexei Karpenko). He had posted the plans on the Internet, and being that Sparkfun.com, who offered hobby based PCB prototyping services at the time, was asking me all the questions, such as why were they receiving orders for this same board, with the mistakes, that would lead me to believe I was the first person to order them. There were a few issues here and there with the current format and Natrium42 helped me sort them out and the PCBs were ordered.

The code on the PassMe used a simple insertion hack. The CPLD sat in between the DS slot and the commercial DS game. When the DS started, it would talk to the game card looking for authentication. Once this was complete, the inserted DS game would load into the 4MB of RAM in the DS and the header would tell the DS what memory address to start executing code from. Being that the GBA Slot (Slot-2) on the DS was directly accessible as memory locations on the DS, the CPLD would watch for the header information to be passed to the DS as it was loading. And when it saw the starting location it would insert it’s own address as the DS loaded, what it believed to be, the memory location to start the official DS game card. This replacement address would be the GBA Slot where unlicensed (Homebrew) code would be run from.”

 

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http://www.ndshb.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=40&page=2

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