NoPass

History

Sales of the Nintendo DS began on November 21, 2004. By mid-January of the following year, DarkFader had developed a ready-made software solution to bypass the Nintendo DS protection, and by the end of the month, Natrium42 had created the PassMe project. On March 3, Lynx assembled the first PassMe (based on Natrium42's project), and from April 4, 2005, he began selling the finished device. Meanwhile, the first dump of the ARM7 processor BIOS was obtained in January 2006! That is, a year after the release of the Nintendo DS console.

The problem with PassMe is that you are essentially bypassing encryption by substituting a command with an address. But you wouldn't be able to substitute the cartridge and pass it off as another, because you don't know what encryption algorithms are used. To find out, you need full access to the ARM7 processor BIOS (since it was responsible for cartridge encryption), and it had read/copy protection - the first 4 kilobytes of the BIOS were protected. You couldn't access them, which means it was impossible to read them.

When you turned on the console, the ARM7 BIOS protection was disabled, and a data table used for subsequent encryption was loaded into the Nintendo DS RAM from the BIOS. After this table was obtained, the BIOS protection was enabled again. And it wouldn't turn off again. It was a kind of vicious circle.

In theory, there should have been some function that had access to the closed part of the BIOS, but it couldn't be found. Many community members thought about finding access to the BIOS: Loopy, Costis, CaithSith2, DarkFader, Joat, and others.

But, apparently, luck smiled on them only after CaithSith2 obtained the asm code for ARM7, which he took from the devkit svn.

It was then that access to the closed part of the code was found. It was possible to inject code there, which read the entire closed part of the BIOS and saved it to the memory card of the GBA flash cartridge.

Essentially, all that remained was to decrypt the BIOS and understand what happens when the console is turned on?

This happened on January 24, 2006. Martin Korth updated his No$GBA emulator and added Nintendo DS support. This fact itself is not very interesting, but it turned out that Martin Korth updated his GBATEK (Game Boy Advance Technical Info) database, where he fully described how the Nintendo DS works.

From this moment, the countdown to the appearance of real Slot-1 flash cartridges for Nintendo DS begins. But they didn't appear immediately, and for some time the market was flooded with NoPass devices.

How did NoPass work?

As I mentioned earlier, the main difference between PassMe and NoPass was not even that the first device required the use of an original NDS cartridge, but that NoPass did not bypass the Nintendo DS protection, but passed through it like an original cartridge.

As a result, everything turned out the same: both PassMe and NoPass allowed running flash cartridges in Nintendo DS game mode. But there was one small problem.

Often, PassMe and NoPass devices could be purchased separately.

And as you can see, they weren't very expensive.

When you used PassMe devices, you could run a Nintendo DS game from a Game Boy Advance flash cartridge. But the latter was only used as a storage place for the game, and since all the procedures in the game were old, the console tried to save the game to the original Nintendo DS cartridge.

And here was the problem.

In Nintendo DS flash cartridges, there were 2 types of saves (not counting the memory chip capacity): EEPROM and FLASH. If your game had an EEPROM save type and the original cartridge had the same save type, everything was fine. But if they had different save types, you simply couldn't save.

And this is where NoPass devices come into play. No cartridge is inserted into them, and there is no memory for saves. A logical question arises: how could you save there? You couldn't.

You might think this is very strange. The size of NoPass is smaller, but what's the point if you can't save? Actually, there was logic here.

NoPass devices were designed exclusively for specific Game Boy Advance flash cartridges. They had their own software and allowed patching Nintendo DS games so that they could save to the memory of the GBA flash cartridge. That is, it was not initially assumed that you would use NoPass devices with other flash cartridges. The idea of buying a separate NoPass device was that you had to have a specific cartridge on hand.

Mostly, such devices were not sold separately, but immediately as a set. And it was these commercial sets that became the basis for NoPass.

Commercial NoPass

Starting from mid-2006, all companies that produced PassMe and PassMe 2 began selling NoPass devices.

NoPass versions from NeoFlash, EzFlash, and SuperCard.

They also began releasing special "sets" consisting of a flash cartridge and a NoPass device. For example, a set (in a very beautiful box) from EZ Team:

Or a set from NeoFlash:

By making such a purchase, you received a ready-made set of a flash cartridge and a NoPass device. The only thing you needed to do was download the game patching program. Often, it removed all the necessary headers from the game and changed the save format so that they could be stored on the memory card of the GBA flash cartridge.

It is also worth noting that most new flash cartridges had their own additional menu, which was tailored specifically for NDS games. That is, the same flash cartridge could be launched both as a regular GBA cartridge (to play GBA games) and in Nintendo DS mode (to run NDS games).

Epilogue

NoPass, with a good GBA flash cartridge, were practically ideal devices. You must agree that it doesn't really matter to you where you write the NDS game: on a flash cartridge for Nintendo DS or on a flash cartridge for Game Boy Advance. You just turn on the console and start the game. What difference does it make where it is located?!

But still, Nintendo DS Slot-1 flash cartridges could offer more.

For example, these two sets from the guys at EZ-Team.

Both perform their main function well – running Nintendo DS games.

But EZ-Flash IV Deluxe can't do anything else, while EZ-Flash V has a number of additional features:

1. The ability to exit the game to the menu;

2. Instant saves;

3. Support for vibration in Nintendo DS games;

4. Support for RAM expansion;

5. Cheats and DMA (direct memory access function).

And much more.

That is, with equally good performance of the main function, Nintendo DS Slot-1 flash cartridges have much more functionality.