Topics: Sleep Kills Weekends / Raspberry Pi Retropie Talk / Switch Modding / Flashme DS Recounting / Yoku’s Island Express
Hello everybody. This is Shane. arm and row. You’re in the passenger seat with me. passenger seat radio. It is may 31 2018.
You’re on my 13 mile commute home. Welcome to the shoe.
Oh, man. Alright, so it is what Thurston Yeah, Thursday. We haven’t had a show and almost a week.
I figured everybody was probably do you think that I’d have tons of to talk about and I have a big laundry list, but I actually
don’t. So I’m just going to kind of recount
this last weekend and whatnot. Hopefully, we’ll have some people live in the chat room. I know we’re a little bit late, but it seems like my job keeps me keeps me late. A little bit every day. I need to start coming in a little bit late
to offset. But
you know, I’m salaried. So, you know, it doesn’t matter how many hours I work, that’s a that’s right. For my boss. Being salary means they can, yeah,
did you have a particular number of hours you have to work
or you do have a certain number of hours, you have to work, but we can work you more and, you know,
too bad if you don’t like,
Alright, so, a memorial day helps. Michael Caine, the great British don’t.
What’s up, man? So let’s see. So Memorial Day weekend,
I’ll tell you what. So I took Tuesday off and Wednesday was ketchup day from work. And I took literally four days off of walking, which is not good. You shouldn’t do that. My body was not pleased with me taking four days off of walking,
but the frickin hotter it gets around here, the less I want to walk. And so I walked like early, early morning, like 5am, it was almost like 80 degrees this morning. And then Tonight, I’ll walk about seven o’clock at night when the sun goes down. And I don’t have it beating down on me the whole time.
You know, in the afternoons, my friend Justin. Hey, Javier. What’s up, man? We we walk in a lunchtime, which
is around 11 o’clock. And of course, you know, it’s just hotter
than out here at Phoenix.
But we do it anyway. And
yeah, it’s good. It’s good.
So this one of the interesting things over the the holiday weekend is
when I’m off, I like to sleep in. You know, in the old days, it used to be like sleeping until, like 11am, which is probably sleeping a little too late.
But the
the four day weekend, I tend to get up around
seven ish, which is still a couple hours later than I normally
get up. But it’s a lot earlier than I normally roll out of bed at nine or 930. And
it’s amazing. You know,
one of the reasons I think the weekends goes so fast and the holidays goes so fast.
That’s twisted retro, Jay. I guess he decided I couldn’t do I couldn’t do
Riley Mark maybe more to keep my patreon slush fund flowing. But apparently I can do other catchphrases. Like, hit him with behind.
So yeah, so anyway, I think that when you sleep in, I didn’t think about it. So we had a four day weekend, right? If I slept until 930,
right. So I usually get up at five to walk,
right. So I get up at five.
That’s four and a half hours a day,
I lose a weekend, right? Because during the week, I’m up at five.
So I’m literally spending four and a half more hours awake every weekday
than I am at night, on the weekends or holidays, right. So that’s literally like losing almost a full day over the course of the weekend. You know, four times almost 16 hours. It’s a lot. So of course, if if, if your day is one quarter shorter, because you sleep in, then of course, we can go faster than the weekdays. So I don’t know what this all boils down to. It really means is, I shouldn’t sleep in like a lazy, I should be up at five o’clock, even on the weekends, which, by the way, they say is better for you is to not adjust your sleep schedule on weekends and holidays. But it.
I don’t like waking up and getting up at five o’clock.
I really thought 730
was easier. Nine o’clock is a lot easier. And,
you know, it used to be on the
on non school nights as it were, I would stay up super late to like midnight when I am you know, but now you know, I really I’m really in bed by like 11 even on how you know, non school nights. I’m I’m in bed by 11 1030 on school nights. So I don’t know where I was going with that. Just that I didn’t sleep as much
over the holiday weekend. And I felt like the weekend lasted a little bit longer. So take it for what it’s worth.
So
what did I do over the holiday weekend? I did jack freakin squat. Isn’t that fantastic? A full four day weekend. I didn’t have to go anywhere. I didn’t have to interface with anybody. It was really just playing, you know, State of Decay to playing Overwatch.
Yeah, it was great. I didn’t. I didn’t feel like I had to do anything. So what I did do
on that Tuesday my day off. On Tuesdays, I took Tuesday off. And of course I had Monday off
my day. On Tuesday, I spent almost the whole day playing with my Raspberry Pi. And I was playing with retro pie, which is, you know, the, you know, it’s Emulation Station. It’s this sort of turnkey solution for multiple machines emulation on the Raspberry Pi. And if you’re willing to me listen. So there are billions and billions and billions of planets. There’s billions of these Raspberry Pi retro pie images floating around
and
some of them to listen
there’s a there’s a phone focus on these turnkey images
whose high pitch
this is Kelly Clarkson nasty throat voice.
There’s this. There’s this focus on doing extensive UI work on these images, right. So if you go download, like arcade punks, has a ton of these retro pie images. And these images are loaded with video clips of the game. Shifting screen captures all of this, you know media
So listen, Joe, you’ve got this so you’ve got a game it’s literally like, you know, 1942 right 1942 is like a two kilobyte game for me right
so that two kilobyte game
you’ve got you know
you got like a six megabytes video
you know mp4 file
you got, you know, a maker to have screenshots you’ve got, you know these Basil’s you’ve got this artwork,
you got to hold this stuff and it’s a two kilobyte game and frankly, if you’re playing 1942 you’re not seeing any of that anyway.
So it’s like there’s a there’s some sort of a happy medium between this god forsaken attract mode hyper spin type solution, and something that just looks aesthetically pleasing to get you to the game you want to play and just play the game.
So you know, there’s there’s sort of an old adage where you spend more time actually configuring loading your Raspberry Pi up tweaking with the configurations doing this doing that then you actually end up actually playing the games that you put the thing together for to begin with.
And it always happens, right, you start drinking with it, and the next thing you know you’re spending six or eight hours drinking with it, trying
to find the perfect main samples trying to find the perfect ROM sets trying to find a version of Shadowlands road that’s not actually kicker merge with two other Rahm’s. It’s a bunch of nonsense.
So Tuesday, I got sucked into that. So my friend Chris Henschel occasionally appears here on the show shows up to listen anyway. And
so he created what he would consider his own baseline ROM set with retro pie, right, he chose sort of a 16 bit theme he put background music on, so he’s got a nice comfy little 16 gigabyte image. Well, he doesn’t care about, you know, Daphne, the LaserDisc games and he doesn’t care about a lot of things I care about so I liked his look but I wanted all of my stuff merged into it. So I’ve got my own retro pie
image
right 64 gigabyte image it’s got Daphne I’ll set up mines all utilitarian man it looks like but it it’s got the games I want and it plays great
so I spent my Tuesday taking his good looking aesthetically pleasing but not overload with you I nonsense image and merged in my Daphne my then and then I was going to merge my main seven now
chasing names should be its own its own
little entry and our vernacular because chasing main it doesn’t it’s like the car no engine right it’s 100% efficiency
you never get there you never get a 100% exactly
the way you want it main setup no matter how hard you try
you can even if you go and download somebody pre configured one or any you it doesn’t exist
it does not exist
so here’s what typically happens
you go up to Usenet or and you paradise for one of these other sites and you grab the entire 51
gigabyte archive of main point 161 images right that’s
everything
but that doesn’t include the CH DS for the you know the hard drive games like gonna legends there’s a bunch of missing it’s a complete main ROM set but not everything you need it doesn’t have all the samples it doesn’t have the CH D files it doesn’t have everything
even though it’s an everything release of main one you know point 161
so then you get that and now you’ve got 17,000
games you know when you include all the the clones and the alternate versions in that unencrypted this bootleg that scramble running on Donkey Kong hardware Donkey Kong running on scramble hardware you know a pop by Pac Man hearts packing all this nonsense right yet 17,000
games to pour through and I don’t know how
many times and I bet every single person who’s listening to this show is done the same thing you get to 17,000 and you start going through them
letter by letter saying am I interested yeah so you go through in your heart all your favorites right away you know the go to games the robot runs the zookeeper the Pooh yen’s the Pac Man the centipede all the go to games you mark those all his favorites right off the bat
and that ends up being about 50 games out of 17,000 so you don’t even have a 1% coverage at this point
then one by one you go through every letter every number of the alphabet and you you boot up the game first of all you make sure that they work
and then you go into the game and
it’s like do i remember this game
no huh does
this game seem interesting to me know alright so we’re not gonna mark that as a favorite move on go to the next one and then you start marketing games this seems kind of interesting so I’ll market is a favorite so after you do this for about 46 hours you end up having about 173 games so now you’ve got a 1% coverage of main
now what do you do okay so literally save yourself okay I got 173 games this is it the soul I need now get rid of the rest of them I don’t want them taking up the space well now there’s no way to do that there’s no way to get rid of them especially if you have the split main sets because you want shale wins row but if you delete the kicker Ron you know kicker is shale ins roads core wrong. So if you delete kicker thinking that you got shale in you don’t because now shearling doesn’t work anymore. So now you keep 17,000 games you hide the ones you don’t want which is 90%, 99%
of them and you just have 173 touchdowns
so I decided to go the other way this time right I was just going to move my whole main compliment over from my old Raspberry Pi card and moving on to his
and I said you know what this
I’m going to start the other way I’m just going to add what I want and that takes ever because you have to fight now here’s the other part of this this is why chasing main should be its own
Lifetime movie
so if you can find a good
so first of all let’s start with it there’s multiple versions of Maine
and while there’s bullet point or you know incremental numbers like you know
version point three seven beta for there’s
there’s point 131 there’s point 161 all of these all of these different main versions
require
Hey Jeffrey dolls and what’s up every single one of these these versions of main might work with the version of the ROM that you have
for say Donkey Kong but maybe not
some of the versions of may require that you have samples for Donkey Kong but some of them don’t
so in order to have a good full coverage spread and this is my personal I’m giving you some some behind the scenes
action here in my
experience Yanni three versions of main make things all work just right.
And we’re not talking Raspberry Pi versus I’m talking about main for all
main 2000 or 2003 really. And main 2010, if you want anything after like 1990 should probably have made 2010 chance or likely that you can get by
with main for all main see need three versions of me.
Now the cool part is inside the inside of the emulator, you can actually choose at launch which version of Maine you want to use. So when you’re adding these games one by one, right, you have to find a ROM set that’s compatible with which version of Maine you want to use. Now, I know what you’re thinking, why not just use the highest one, why not just us main 2010, which should have no need for samples, it should be able to work with almost everything, you would think that the later the version, the better
not so and I’ll tell you why later versions of main assumed higher system specs. So main 2010 has more bloated, slower cores, then older versions of Maine. So
when you play Star Trek strategic operations simulator on May 2010, it requires more hardware that if you played on Main for all, but it’s the same game, there’s no speed increase. There’s no advantage other than the fact that requires more hardware and or main 2010. So you want to run that in the lowest hardware configuration possible, which should be named for all. So this is the nonsense that’s going on. And every single game you bring in to your main configuration or your Raspberry Pi. You go through this nonsense. Do I want to run? Do I need to run it in a lower version of me? Probably not. So I’m going to start with 2003. Is my baseline. Does this Rob run in 2003? Yes. Does it run? Well. Yes. Does it overtax my pie. No. Alright, so we’re going to leave this default to the 2003 do all the controls work right. For some reason the writing D pad on my we, you pro pad does not work right in Maine, for I don’t know why I’m sure I could figure it out if
I want to dig with it for four or five hours,
but I don’t. So let’s just run that in May 2003, where the D pad works fine.
So this is all the nonsense This is
just this. And again, when I say you spend more time building,
honing curating this thing
but you actually end up do playing the games
and you think well, I’ll just go find somebody else’s image you go find somebody else’s image and guess what you’re doing taking off the stuff you don’t want adding the stuff that he missed sticking with this sticking with that so you’re still
sticking around
money ahead says start with something blank and add what you want right tailored to what you want. Don’t go grab some hundred and 28 gigabyte image and start pruning.
So in this case, I am now up to I think 130 titles in my main section of my Raspberry Pi so there you go.
So that’s what I spent my Tuesday nonsense doing is sticking around with that Raspberry Pi.
Let’s see what else so that was Tuesday.
Yeah,
what else was going on?
Sorry,
traffic sucks.
I’m on grand you know, anybody who lives in Phoenix knows that grand is the devil but most of the time a lot of the time grain is also the Devil You Know the because whilst that I 17 which is my other way of getting home can be either 31 minutes home if everything is okay or it could be 48 minutes home if everything is not okay.
Jeffrey doll Have you tried modding your switch yet? No. And I’ll tell you why.
I’m intrigued by the whole thing
and I want to talk about that good nice of you to bring that up because we were talking about this
on my channel of friends over the weekend
so here’s the problem Nintendo is banning
Nintendo accounts
not the machines right so
if I have my account I’ve got
you know 89 games I purchased on this account i mod or even remotely look like I’ve modded my switch
Nintendo will ban my actual account which means I stopped I’m not going to necessarily get updates I’m not gonna be able to play online all sorts of nonsense and apparently that band follows you from machine to machine so it’s not like the old days where
your 3d s gets kicked off
line but if you go buy another one and you register your account on there you’re good to go
this is like permit perm global ban
and that’s not cool man. So if I wanted to play with modding a switch, I would have to buy a brand new one that has no account on it whatsoever
buy a brand new one never
linked it to an account that I care about, right because you have to link it to an account in order to do basic stuff
or I would have to keep it 100% completely offline
but a lot of the homebrew stuff and whatnot actually reach out to the internet to update themselves and things like that so
you’d have to be really really careful but there was something of interest that we noted
over the over the weekend is so a lot of people blame and video for this glitch because it’s a it’s a hack the shield the shield, the the switch hack is a
an unpatched usable security flaw in the Nvidia taker chipset
so Nintendo can’t patch that that’s why everybody’s all excited about it. Because no matter what Nintendo can’t do, a system update will stop you from being able to hack into your switch through this exploit
the how the exploit works is you get this little tiny, this little tiny piece of plastic and you slide it into the right joy con rail all the way to the bottom. And essentially it does some sort of a short because this exploit to be uncovered and you can then inject you know the hacker one ever and now you’re in you’re in like in there like swimwear.
What it really boils down to is, it’s the exact same thing that happened with the Nintendo DS, right,
those of you who remember the old school days, Nintendo DS had something called
flash. And what this was is you could essentially flashing insecure boot ROM on the Nintendo DS through what essentially was a Nintendo sponsored whole, literally and figuratively, and they’re operating system. And here’s how it worked. For those of you who do not remember
in order to restore this is part of this conjecture. Part of this is fact
in order to easily allow Nintendo repair facilities to take a dead or somehow
mutated Nintendo DS and return it to to stock factory settings.
They allowed for a jumper accessible outside the system through a little tiny hole
to be shorted out, which would essentially unlock the boot loader so that you could flash a clean copy of the firmware on to the unit.
So let’s say that somehow somebody Nintendo DS got up. Or instead of going through some nonsense, right, they opened up this little tiny hole that opened up a little double jumper pad, a little, a little jumper pad on the motherboard.
If you had a special tool, you could stick it in the hole. And while that is shorted out, you have direct access to flash
the BIOS essentially. So I’m assuming Nintendo had a little card or or whatnot, some sort of a custom card, but they would stick in the Nintendo DS slot, they would show up this tool in the hole which would hit the jumper they’d power the system on and it would read flash the thing back to stock factory now that got them probably to fix 90% of the Nintendo DS is that came in that wasn’t a hardware problem, right?
So that was to help aid them.
Well, somebody figured out what that jumper was for. Somebody figured out that there was a way of of
getting a flash
card
like the cyclo
DS are
are for whatever
and as long as you were sorting that pad
on the motherboard.
You could use a special piece of software written by hackers to inject an insecure boot image onto the machine. At that point, you didn’t have to use a super card or
any of these other weird hacking
tools to get into your DS, you’re essentially had an unlocked DS and unlocked boot loader if you will. That opened all sorts of possibilities. Now Nintendo learned their lesson with the 3d s that exploit never existed. There was never a little hole
that you could shove a little tool into
to compromise the system
fast forward and Nintendo Switch
the exact same thing which we we call the tin foil toothpick method was reintroduced into the switch
this was not invidious design and video didn’t didn’t create this flash whole this was all Nintendo trying to give themselves an easy way of flashing these things back to stock recovery or stock boom right
and video had nothing to do with this. Yes, their system is the one that had the exploit Nintendo gave you a door into it and easy door one that didn’t have to even open the machine up to exploit
simply sliding a little piece of metal into a hole
triggers the exploit that’s all on Nintendo
and it’s a bonus the exploit itself so now we’ve got a two parter we’ve got we’ve got a hardware hole that cannot be patched with a with a firmware upgrade or something by Nintendo. And you’ve got that directly coupled to a hardware exploit that cannot be patched with software. You have a completely unfixable fully open hack into the Nintendo Switch and Nintendo’s gotta be. And you can say, Oh, it’s invidious fault, but it’s not Nintendo provided the doorway. Nvidia just, you know, they up and had their own security or which, by the way, affects all other and video devices such as the shield, such as
the Chromebooks that are based on the Nvidia GPU. They’re all victim to that exploit.
But Nintendo made it extremely easy. Well,
per se. I mean, I wouldn’t have found it, but they gave everybody with a piece of without bobby pin x. That’s essentially what this is. If you go and look at one of these keys to unlock your Nintendo Switch. It’s a piece of plastic that has a little tiny bobby pin in it, but just slide down, and it stuffs the bobby pin into a hole and creates the short but
that’s all on Nintendo. They up. So what are they going to have to do to fix this?
They can’t.
So every switch that’s out there right now is 100% hackable. And there’s nothing
Nintendo can do about it
kind of makes you warm fuzzy inside. So what Nintendo can do
is watch for behavior
within their operating system
that triggers a modification
notice or or
undocumented software running on the system,
they can see that they can’t stop
you
what they can do though is control you from the server infrastructure side which means they see dark uni has a switch that’s accessing the store they can reach back and say what’s this system up to what has been running on this system as per as told per hour operating system they can tell they know and they will take matters into their hands on their side to ban that account right you sign up for another one Sure. don’t plan on purchasing anything on its you’re gonna have to have soon no accounts to hack with. But if you’ve ever put an account on that machine, right, you want to legitimate player Mario Kart eight, you’ve got a legitimate account on there and can ban them all. That’s bad. So back to the original question if I modded my switch now, nor if I ran it in any sort of an insecure mode for that very purpose. My son’s account is on there, my account is on there, I am not going to have Nintendo banning my accounts for that nonsense. Now, when I can get my hands on a used switch for, you know, 125 bucks or some sort of an impulse buy number, I will get it I will flash it back to stock recovery. You know, I’m going to flash it back to out of the box.
And
and then I’m going to put no account on it. I’m going to get myself
one of those little bobby pin keys,
I’m going to get myself that team.
executor, frickin
flash device, and then I’m going to use it solely for homebrew and pires right, because that’s what you have to do.
Yeah, so what i would i mod know
if you’ve got an extra switch sitting in the box that you’ve never hope to an account
that you were saving to flip on eBay that you never got around to doing. And it’s sitting in the box, and you want to with it with a mod
with one of those little mod keys, and an executor and all that stuff. Feel free.
Here’s when you’re going to be safe to mess with your existing switch
when they can actually completely
replace the operating system. Right.
And this is sort of what I’m waiting for. I I cannot believe for a second that somebody has not thought about putting the Android operating system on a Nintendo Switch game card. Right? This makes so much sense to me. You put a card in, I thought I’ve talked about this before you put the card in your flip it on your boots straight into Android, like you’re on a tablet, bang. There’s no Nintendo operating system involved. There’s no know Nintendo layer. All it does when you stick the card and you flip it on, right? So here’s what’s going to solve the problem is there some sort of a bootstrap or that has to get you to that cartridge, right? That means Nintendo’s OS layer is running at least at the most primitive like ring zero level with this mod would allow you to do is
turn it off. Put the mod in in surface team executor or some sort of a flash card right. bootstrap immediately outside of the Nintendo ring. Zero ring one, whatever that nonsense is and boot straight to Android. So when I want to use my switch as a functioning tablet on the go, I could slide turn it off slide the mod item in stick the little special cartridge in that doesn’t require Nintendo’s bootstrap it or run and boom, then I’m good to go. Until then.
Didn’t say the magic word.
So there Yeah. Anyway, so I actually found my video my original video showing me flashing
and Nintendo DS
using a toothpick with a piece of aluminum foil wrapped around the tip. That
was the hacker tool of choice
for the Nintendo DS.
And those were some fun days, man. They really were. I mean, you were scared shirtless. You were going to blow it up.
Because it turned out this is some useless trivia for you. monitors
that never got around a missing with the Nintendo DS
right next to that jumper that actually let you
hack the Nintendo DS with some sort of a transistor or some other exposed piece of metal that if you were to jump that across one of the other jumper pants, right, you would actually fry the thing. I mean, you were done. It was overdone. You had a break. So if you didn’t put the toothpick directly in straight,
if you deviated at all right,
if the the wad of foil on the tip was too big, any of that sort of nonsense, you could easily break your, you know, $249
Nintendo DS at the time. So it was it was unnerving to do that.
So the good news was is that eventually they came out with a version of this flashing tool that gave you an audible indicator right so you part of the problem is you were trying to stick it in the hole well looking at the screen so you could tell if you were done or not right but eventually they got it to where it would run it and then we go to tick tick tick tick and as soon as you jumped the plenty did did the pad was curved so when you think of a jumper you think of two flat connections This one was concave so the edge is rolled up on the sides and it was really hard to get a good solid connection it was an art form but when you couldn’t hear you had to see it was always a chance your hand would be a little at an angle or something and you would end up popping that son of a I never broke one I never destroyed one but a lot of people I know did and hence the the error the rumor mill came around and you have to be really careful that’s I think when they implemented this but the audible you know so you could tell without looking at the screen whether you were done you were connected right you know you had the jumper pushed in far enough whatever
fun times man fun times
in the foil toothpick method is right back into play with the switch. I love it.
Love it. Speaking of the switch and
there’s a new it’s a new game came out, I think last week called Yoku Island
Express
and I bought it I haven’t played it yet. I watched some videos. I’ve read some reviews. It comes from a group
Publishing Group called Team 17. And for those of you who are big Amiga heads Team 17, along with sag gnosis and a couple of other companies pretty much define the term quality
for video gaming in the 16 bit world
and Team 17 had all sorts of stuff alien breed, you know, just
loads of great stuff. Worms was a was a team 17 thing, all great stuff. And so now a friend of mine who was actually like a retro gaming magazine editor, Ashley day is now I think, like a senior VP working for them, something like that. So hello, actually, if you listen to the show,
I recently hook back up with him on Twitter. And you know, he, they’re all real proud of this game. And they should be. It looks great. It looks like it plays great. It’s sort of a metro vein he meets pinball. I know that sounds like a weird combination,
but it looks fantastic. Even people I trust like Chris Henschel, they all say that it’s great it’s worth the bias 20 bucks that’s a little pricey you know, with all of these you know, dollar 99 for 99 899
games kicking around
but and I’m not sure how will play portable the videos that I’ve seen of course are fed from you know Dr mode so I don’t know how well it will play when it’s shrunk down small on the screen but I’m very excited to take a look at that and to play that so maybe I’ll do some off screen Plex I’ve got the tripod and everything so I could probably do that
I guess that’s about it 35 minute trip home not bad generate a pull into the driveway
have my meager meal for dinner and then plan when I’m gonna walk when it isn’t so
hot outside
all right well listen I hope you enjoyed the show
yeah well I don’t know if I’m a show again tomorrow or not if I
can come up with a good list of stuff to talk about maybe this is Shane arm under Apache radio see an extended care when you
