3DS homebrew is here! ⊟

If you have a Nintendo 3DS/2DS (or even a New 3DS!) and a copy of Cubic Ninja (they’re getting pretty expensive now), you can get started with running unauthorized games and apps on your system right now, thanks to Smealum’s “Ninjhax” exploit and the Homebrew Launcher.

But won’t this just pave the way for piracy? Won’t Nintendo immediately patch this vulnerability with a firmware update? What can people even do with Ninjhax right now? And will we ever be able to get around the handheld’s region lock? We asked the 3DS hacker himself, Jordan “Smealum” Rabet*, all of these important questions – read what he has to say below!

Probably the biggest concern amongst homebrew opponents is that any advancements toward running unauthorized programs on a console will inevitably lead to piracy. Smealum has said that Ninjhax, as it stands now, does not allow users to run commercial or pirated software, but many are still convinced that this the 3DS is on the verge of suffering the same piracy problems as the DS.

“It’s a legitimate concern for sure,” says Smealum. “However, I’m going to reiterate what I’ve been saying for the past few months now: what I’m releasing just isn’t capable of running of running pirated 3DS software. It’s not a limitation I or anyone else put in place; it’s just technically the state of the matter, and that’s the entire reason why I feel comfortable releasing this at all.”

But can’t Nintendo just release a firmware update to shut this all down? After all, the company clearly wants to obstruct these developments as much as possible. Not long after Smealum revealed that all someone needed was a copy of Cubic Ninja to run this exploit, Nintendo pulled the game from the Japanese eShop (the game did not release with a digital version in any other regions).

Smealum expect the company won’t wait too long to strike back: “I think it’s likely they’ll be releasing a hotfix for the exploit soon-ish. Of course I don’t know when, and I don’t know how good the fix will be. It’s all cat-and-mouse from here. Given the nature of the exploit though, I feel fairly confident that they won’t be able to perfectly patch out the vulnerabilities we use, unless they had ninjas somehow infiltrating our ranks.”

You might remember that Smealum originally intended to release Ninjhax a couple of months ago but delayed its debut when Nintendo announced the New 3DS. “Once I decided to delay the release, I got a little depressed,” he said. “There was a pretty big backlash, somewhat understandably, and even without taking that into account, it was just a huge disappointment to have to wait. Because of that, I didn’t really work on it much at all until I got a New 3DS in my hands, and it was pretty much the same for everyone else I was working with.”

“Fortunately, though, a number of people did continue working on their own things and overall improved our understanding of the console. Once I got things working the way I wanted on my New 3DS, I joined them in that effort, and overall I think what we achieved is just a much more polished set of tools for development and a better understanding of the console in general. This also gave people – including me – time to work on their homebrew applications, and so we have a much nicer launch lineup now than we did in August.”

As for what you can do or install with the Homebrew Launcher right now, while the scene is still in its infancy, there are already a few interesting items you can experiment with. He points out, “I think the main highlights are a couple of very cool emulators such as blargSnes and GameYob, which as you’ve probably guessed are for the SNES and Game Boy; they run really well. I’m also pretty happy with the state of 3DScraft, which is meant to be a Minecraft adaptation. It’s still pretty rough around the edges and crashes at times, but that’s mostly due to the fact that we’re currently reverse engineering the 3DS’s GPU. I think once we understand it better and are able to use it more efficiently, we’ll see a lot of cool games and apps pop up.”

Other currently available 3DS homebrew applications include first-person shooter Yeti3DS, an NES emulator, a CHIP-8 emulator, a media streaming server, and a basic FTP server. There are a few other developments on the way, and a lot of potential that hasn’t been explored yet.

“Circumventing the region lock is more than likely possible,” he adds. “I still have not had time to properly look into it and put a [proof of concept] together, however, so I could be wrong. The main thing is though that using it would mean having to go through the homebrew launcher every time one wants to play a game from another region, which I don’t expect a lot of people would be willing to suffer through. But maybe I’m wrong!”