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[Hi]

How come the nds doesn't need a modchip in order to run homebrew and "backups"?

was nintendo just careless about security, or is there something else? Is it a thing with handheld devieces? None of the gb's ever needed one and I don't think the psp does (although, you have to downgrade your firmware) So howcome? How come only people who know how to solder get the pleasure of running homebrew on the wii and gamecube and all that while normal people like me can only do it on the nds, gb's, and psp?

[DeVS]

Um the Supercards and such are "mod chips". They are devices that bypass the DS's security. Just because they are plug and play(doesnt need soldered) doesn't mean there not mod chips.

[NT]

No soldering required when you've got a handy-dandy cartridge slot that runs executable code.  :cool:

[sonicwind]

the real question is why would you want it to be some pure "mod chip" that you had to solder into your ds.... that would decrease the sales of hardware a little  :razz:

[754boy]

the real question is why would you want it to be some pure "mod chip" that you had to solder into your ds.... that would decrease the sales of hardware a little  :razz:

Would also be a pain in the ass to install. Just look at that PSP modchip  :shock:

[bitblt]

How come the nds doesn't need a modchip in order to run homebrew and "backups"?

was nintendo just careless about security, or is there something else?

Yes, both Nintendo and Sony seem to be careless with security and have software vulnerabilities.  The hackers are just too clever. At least Nintendo was smart enough to put in enough security that special hardware is required, unlike with PSP. Now it appears that PS3 and Wii will soon be hacked too. heh

[hijoputismo]

this one is easy:
no modchips were needed until the naked optical disk media came to the console world, and non-disc machines like the ds have never "needed" a modchip.

i pray every night for cds and dvds to go away from the videogames industry. and i know they will be gone some day.

[Koji]

this one is easy:
no modchips were needed until the naked optical disk media came to the console world, and non-disc machines like the ds have never "needed" a modchip.

i pray every night for cds and dvds to go away from the videogames industry. and i know they will be gone some day.

Ahh but we're quickly falling into a new (potentially) harsher world. Pretty soon, game systems and movies will move entirely away from "physical" formats. Much the same way Nintendo's VC system works, only with the latest games. The combination of cheap high speed internet, the slow demise of physical currency, and the general simplicity of just having to download versus going out and buying is quickly catching up. We're going to start seeing some very powerful encryptions soon, tailored specifically for game systems. Since the hardware in game consoles can be individualized with no real risk that a future hardware upgrade will cause some way that the encryption to dis-allow usage it's far more likely to happen on them then it is on an actual PC, which currently has it's hardware being changed and upgraded as time goes by.

If the next next-gen isn't done like this, the next next next-gen will definitely. Movies are going to be the same way. Cheap(er) downloadable movies will replace hard copies.

[felix]

Nintendo is not careless. They knew about the "security holes" and didn't do much about it. The only update they did was with firmware 4 which shut out WiFiMe and PassMe.

If they want, they can pull a Sony and make games auto update the "security".

They just don't care enough because the DS is selling so well (unlike some other handheld gaming machine).

[hijoputismo]

yeah pay per download is getting bigger and bigger.
i like that better than cd or dvd (those media are just too slow), but i love owning physically my favorite games, as i love nintendo software cardboard boxes.

[AOforever1]

Nintendo is not careless. They knew about the "security holes" and didn't do much about it. The only update they did was with firmware 4 which shut out WiFiMe and PassMe.

If they want, they can pull a Sony and make games auto update the "security".

They just don't care enough because the DS is selling so well (unlike some other handheld gaming machine).

Well said.

[bitblt]

At the risk of sounding contrary I will have to insist that Nintendo was careless.

I agree Nintendo doesn't seem be concerned much about piracy because they are doing so well. There isn't much they can do about it anyway. Nintendo is stuck with a hardware design flaw. The "pass through" exploit can't be corrected by Nintendo with a simple firmware update. Nintendo would have to change the DS hardware (dye process). Even if they did make the change it's too late now because the "pass through" exploit has allowed hackers (a year later) to dump the DS BIOS and crack slot1 encryption. DS encryption would have been much more difficult to crack if not for the "pass through" vulnerability. Now most slot1 flash cards fully emulate "real" games and Nintendo can't change the behavior of slot1 encryption without making millions of DS/games obsolete. Also, the idea of Nintendo requiring DS owners to authenticate through a network isn't realistic because millions of DS owners don't have convenient WiFi access.

Sony has been especially careless with PSP because it doesn't even require third party hardware to hack it. Firmware updates haven't been very effective either. The PSP OS seems to be full of holes. I thought Sony was finally going to get it right with PS3/IBM cell security but now there is rumor of a PS3 harddrive exploit. It's probably some vulnerability related to downloadable game content. I'm not that surprised if the rumor is true. I guess Sony giving developers the ability to run Linux and homebrew out of the box wasn't enough.

Take the cracking of DVD encryption for example. All that had to happen was one DVD to get published with one file unencrypted and DVD was quickly hacked. It's almost always some type of carelessness.

Regardless anything can be hacked with either a hardware or software modification. Anything.

[tenba]

The PSP OS seems to be full of holes.

While I agree that I found it much easier and cheaper to run homebrew on the PSP than the NDS (mine shipped with firmware 1.50), I wouldn't say that the PSP OS is "full of holes".  I'd say it's "full of built-in features".  Adding features creates usability, complexity, functionality -- and "holes".  The PSP OS has features such as dealing with memory sticks and playing multimedia that the NDS doesn't do natively, which makes it more likely that the PSP will be hacked.  Every added user feature is another attack vector.

Regardless anything can be hacked with either a hardware or software modification. Anything.

Agreed.  However, it's an economics game.  They don't have to outrun the bear.  They don't have to make things completely unhackable -- they only need to make things sufficiently expensive to hack relative to the benefit gained by hacking.  Right now, I buy hack solutions because DSOrganize, DSLinux, and DS AIM are basically priceless to me -- you can't run anything equivalent to these programs without hacking the NDS, so $72 in hardware to hack the NDS and run them is downright cheap.  Likewise, there's no way to store user data on the NDS without a hack solution.  However, if someone made cartridges with enough memory to store all the data necessary and sold DSOrganize, DSLinux, and DS AIM for $10 each, it would not have been worth it for me to buy the $72 hack solution.  (Likewise, for those in pirate-land, if game rentals are easy and it costs only $3 each to rent, then someone would need to want to pirate more than 24 games to make the $72 hack card worth the price.  However, if games cost $20 each and no rental stores are available, then it suddenly becomes worthwhile to hack the console to pirate games if there are at least 4 games that the pirate wants.)

Another example of piracy being an economics game:  I used to be a DVD pirate.  My time used to be cheap, and DVDs used to be expensive.  However, these days, it's just not worth it for me to pirate DVDs at all.  It just takes too long to copy a DVD on my computer.   (The last I checked, it took my computer half an hour to copy a 2 hour movie.  Horrible ratio.)  My computer is a bit old and slow (OK, it's very, very old and very, very slow), but it works great for what I want it to do as long as I don't pirate DVDs.  I would probably need to pay $500 for a computer that is capable of pirating a DVD in a reasonable amount of time, and I can buy 50 DVDs for that price because, on the other side, DVDs have become cheaper.  I can get a bunch of older classic titles online for less than $10 each.  I don't have time to even watch 50 DVDs, much less pirate them first, so it's just illogical for me to pirate.  Absolutely no hacking or decrypting is needed or even desired because the DVD sellers merely found the price vs time point that just makes it not worth my effort to pirate them.

Basically, a console company doesn't need to make things completely unhackable to render piracy harmless.  They only have to (a) make the games difficult/expensive to pirate relative to the value of the games and (b) sell to a rich enough market that they have little incentive to pirate.  If they get the economic balance right, then when pirates do appear, they're people with more time than money who wouldn't play the games at all if they couldn't pirate them, so there are no lost sales there.  And, if it's all done right, they don't need to spend so much effort on preventing homebrewers from running their programs.  I don't think that console companies inherently want to prevent homebrew from running; I think preventing homebrew from running is just an unfortunate side effect from them doing what they can to try to help protect their commercial game developers.  If the game developer is going to be able to sell only one copy of a game because everybody else will pirate the game, then it's not worth it for them to develop for the console.

So, all that is just to try to explain why I don't think the PSP is "full of holes".  Firmware 1.5 allows homebrew to run, but I don't think that's inherently a problem in and of itself.  I think it's a feature.  It's just unfortunate that humans can't be trusted and Sony has to try to take away useful features to try to make things more difficult for pirates.

At the risk of sounding contrary I will have to insist that Nintendo was careless.

Yes, I would agree that Nintendo and Sony were arguably very "careless" if you assume that their goal is to create an unhackable machine and/or prevent the games from being pirated.  However, I don't think that's where their focus was -- as you said, anything can be hacked (at least, anything sufficiently usable), so trying to make an unhackable machine would not have been a good use of resources.  When you get right down to it, I think Nintendo and Sony were trying to build usable, playable game machines.  If I get to choose (and I do choose, to some extent, with my wallet), I would definitely prefer that they concentrate on making more usable, more playable, and more fun game machines than making less hackable ones.  I think that's what Nintendo kept its concentration on, and I think that's why the Wiis are still selling out everywhere as soon as the shipments arrive.  Sony got distracted by the pirates and the piracy issue, and they put too much effort into security over overall usability for the PS3 (with apparently minimal success).  As a result, there are PS3s that nobody's buying, just sitting around on the shelves.  I think Nintendo is actually very smart to be so "careless".

[tenba]

How come the nds doesn't need a modchip in order to run homebrew and "backups"?

was nintendo just careless about security, or is there something else? Is it a thing with handheld devieces? None of the gb's ever needed one and I don't think the psp does (although, you have to downgrade your firmware) So how come? How come only people who know how to solder get the pleasure of running homebrew on the wii and gamecube and all that while normal people like me can only do it on the nds, gb's, and psp?

I think you might be onto something when you mentioned portability.  I know that the PS2 can run backups without a modchip.  However, I don't think "normal people" tend to know about it.  I never would've known that the PS2 can be hacked without a modchip if my boyfriend didn't accidentally find out that one of his coworkers knew how to do it.  The probability of such a thing happening were actually rather low.  However, the NDS is much easily accessible.  People everywhere seem to be pulling their NDS Lites out, and when I show interest, they seem very happy to show off what the NDS can do, including telling me how to hack it just as casual conversation.  This doesn't happen with non-portable machines.  So, for all I know, maybe someone has found a way to hack the Gamecube or the Wii without a modchip as well, but I just haven't met the right people to tell me how to do it.  The portables would seem to allow more and easier collaboration between hackers, and it might increase the probability of hacking if people can just test things whenever and wherever the inspiration strikes them rather than having to wait to go home to try it.

[bitblt]

Wow. Excellent posts tenba.

At the risk of sounding contrary I will have to insist that Nintendo was careless.

Yes, I would agree that Nintendo and Sony were arguably very "careless" if you assume that their goal is to create an unhackable machine and/or prevent the games from being pirated.  However, I don't think that's where their focus was -- as you said, anything can be hacked (at least, anything sufficiently usable), so trying to make an unhackable machine would not have been a good use of resources.  When you get right down to it, I think Nintendo and Sony were trying to build usable, playable game machines . . .

Agreed. However both Sony and Nintendo have invested time and money into R&D to implement security measures. Obviously they are both interested in trying to prevent software piracy with current generation hardware. Unfortunately for them the attempt has been futile. I believe Sony is embarrassed and disappointed that all PSP versions can now be hacked. I don't think they intended that to be a PSP "feature".