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WMB and WiFiMe
The main problem with PassMe was that it was an extremely inconvenient design that also stuck out a lot from the Nintendo DS cartridge slot. Of course, PassMe could be removed from the equation if you installed the FlashMe firmware on the Nintendo DS. But it turned out to be a bit of a strange story. To use FlashMe, you had to buy PassMe, which became unnecessary immediately after installing FlashMe.
Over time, a second method of flashing appeared, through a vulnerability in DS Download Play.
As is known, Nintendo put a lot of effort into developing the wireless capabilities of the Nintendo DS. With two NDS consoles, you can play directly without any routers. This, by the way, is still a distinctive feature of Nintendo. They add Wi-Fi capabilities to their consoles, but they don't do it mindlessly - just connect to a Wi-Fi router with the internet and you'll be happy. No, many Nintendo consoles can not only connect to a router and receive data from it, but also send their own signal, which can be received by another console.
On April 13, 2005, Tim Schuerewegen released a driver and program that copied the capabilities of PassMe but used the wireless capabilities of the console.
This technology was called WMB (Wireless MultiBoot Hack).
History
The history of this hack method begins with a post on the Warp Pipe forum.
MetalSonic53 wrote that he turned on the PictoChat program and started typing messages, sending them to the chat room, and the Nintendo DS started working as an access point and broadcasting the signal outside. He recorded this when using the Network Stumbler program.
It turned out that the MAC address indicated above (00-09-BF) belongs to Nintendo. And the speed of 2 Mbps indicated the IEEE 802.11b standard.
This message was reposted on the gbadev.org forum. And after that, the community members began to study how Wi-Fi works on the Nintendo DS. The discussion stretched over 34 pages.
In the end, it turned out that there were three problems:
1. You had to have 2 Nintendo DS and 2 games that had a network mode because the console could not communicate normally with the router. More precisely, it was not even about the console, but that it sent signals, and the router simply did not understand them.
DrEggman set the LinkSys router's MAC address to that of the Nintendo DS, and the router almost went crazy. After that, user Darkain bought two consoles with two games and posted a recording of packet interception between the consoles.
2. It was necessary to decrypt the packets that the consoles exchanged with each other. Forum users long suspected that Darkain had not been able to intercept the packets correctly and that some of them were lost. But in the end, it turned out that the Nintendo DS simply compressed the packets, and they were decompressed on the other console. After the community members understood this, they were able to correctly open the data packets and work with them.
3. In the end, it turned out that not every router was suitable. Most chipsets working with the Wi-Fi 802.11 standard were designed in such a way that they could not send incompatible data packets, and sometimes even tried to correct them. Essentially, the Nintendo DS had chips that worked with "Ni-Fi" technology (Nintendo's implementation of Wi-Fi), rather than using the Wi-Fi 802.11 standard.
When all this was figured out, and many people participated in this (Darkain, Tim Schuerewegen, DarkFader, and others), Tim Schuerewegen developed his driver for Wi-Fi cards with the RT2500 and RT2560 chipsets. And only after that everything worked as it should.
Wireless MultiBoot Hack
The essence of this technology was that you could run a demo version of a game or homebrew program on the Nintendo DS without using the PassMe device.
To be honest, I had some doubts about what was easier? Buy PassMe or try to flash the console via WMB. But in 2023, the first PassMe with the right game (from Natrium42 or Lynx) is no longer available for sale, but WMB can still be launched. The only problem is that it's not that simple.
You will need a special PCI or PCMCIA Wi-Fi card with the RT2500 or RT2560 chipset.
When you have such a card, you need to install special drivers for it. Essentially, it turns out that you cannot use this card for regular Wi-Fi; it is only suitable for working with the Nintendo DS Download Station.
To understand which card you need, look at the list: Wireless 802.11g devices based on the Ralink RT2500 chipset.
Personally, I bought the PCMCIA Asus WL-107G card. Please note, if you decide to follow my path, you will also need an old laptop with Windows XP. I bought a Dell Inspiron 510m a couple of years ago, and it has been saving me constantly.
You also need your DS firmware to be no higher than the third version. You can read more about Nintendo DS firmware versions in the article: «Nintendo DS Firmware».
If you already have a Windows XP computer, a compatible Wi-Fi card with the RT2500 chipset, and a Nintendo DS with firmware no higher than the third version, then you can proceed.
Preparation
Download two archives.
rt2560_app_wmb_1_5_2.zip – program for working with WMB;
rt2560_driver_1_0_0_8.zip – drivers for the Wi-Fi card.
Install your Wi-Fi card in the computer and turn it on. When the computer boots up and recognizes the new device, it will offer to install drivers. At this stage, you need to provide the drivers that are in the archive rt2560_driver_1_0_0_8.zip.
After installing the drivers, your Wi-Fi card will appear in the device manager like this:
This means that the card has been recognized and the drivers are suitable. Otherwise, you have the wrong card.
It happens that the same card can have different sets of chips.
Next, unzip rt2560_app_wmb_1_5_2.zip to the root of the C:\ drive. After that, rename this folder to something simpler, for example, name the folder nds.
You should have this (on the C:\ drive there is a folder nds, and in it are the files wmb.exe, wmb-xp64.exe, the data folder, and others):
Place the demo version of the game or program you want to transfer to the Nintendo DS in the data folder (C:\nds\data). In my case, it's the demo version of the game Brain Age, the file is called brain_age_demo.nds.
Now we are fully prepared.
Running Wireless MultiBoot Hack
If you double-click on the wmb.exe file, a black window will open and immediately close. This program is designed to be run from the command line. Therefore, click "Start" – "Run", in the "Run program" window, enter cmd and click OK. A command prompt window will open:
If your drive is not C:\ (like mine), type C: and press Enter.
Now you need to enter the nds folder, to do this, type cd nds and press Enter.
And at this stage, you need to enter the name of the file we want to run – wmb.exe. But if you just run the program, an error will appear: error: parameter -data is required.
The program started but complains that the data you want to transfer is not specified. Let's repeat the previous command, but specify the file we need (note that you can specify the absolute path to the file, but if you placed it in the data folder, you can just write the file name).
Enter wmb.exe -data brain_age_demo.nds and press Enter.
The program tries to load the brain_age_demo.nds file and says everything is OK. After that, the message appears: Sending multiboot beacons & waiting for authentication.
Now you need to turn on your Nintendo DS and go to the DS Download Play menu, and there you will see that your game demo (or homebrew application) is being transferred via Wi-Fi.
Next, press A and confirm again that you want to load this file.
After that, the file will start loading on the console.
On the computer, the download process will start.
And on the console, the demo will start.
Let's talk about one error. If after the message Sending multiboot beacons & waiting for authentication, the phrase DeviceWritePacket() failed starts appearing constantly:
To solve this problem, you need to restart the Wi-Fi card. Right-click on the "My Computer" icon and select "Properties". Then open the "Hardware" tab and click on the "Device Manager" button. You need to open the "Nintendo DS – 802.11" tab (by clicking on the plus sign next to this label) and right-click on "Ralink RT2560 Device", then click on the "Properties" button. In the menu that opens, go to the "Advanced" tab and just click OK.
The card will restart and start working. You can return to the command prompt and repeat the command. This time everything will be fine.
I recommend doing this in case of any errors.
WiFiMe
Running game demos is cool, of course. But the most interesting feature of WMB is that it can be used to run .nds files from a Game Boy Advance flash cartridge. This feature is called WiFiMe.
What do you need?
1. A Game Boy Advance flash cartridge that can run in NDS mode, for example, the cheapest Supercard can do this (plus you need a memory card for it).
2. You need to download the archive wifime.zip
Please note. WiFiMe uses the capabilities and functionality of WMB, which means all the steps I did above must be completed by you!
If you have everything ready, you can proceed.
Unzip the wifime.zip archive. Copy the resulting wifime folder and paste it into the data folder. You should have the path C:\nds\data\wifime\ and there should be 5 files: arm7, arm9, beacons, header, rsa.
After that, run the wmb program, but with the command wmb.exe -data wifime
The messages wifime ok and Sending multiboot beacons & waiting for authentication will appear.
Now insert your flash cartridge into the Nintendo DS and turn on the console. Go to the DS Download Station and select our Wireless Multiboot “WiFiMe”. Press A twice and the download process will begin.
At this stage, our flash cartridge will start in Nintendo DS mode, and you can run the same game demo or, for example, start flashing the console using FlashMe.
