11/03/2025 to 11/09/2025
Spent Tuesday fighting off a head cold, dive team meeting in the afternoon. Wednesday, I continued fighting off whatever head cold I have picked up. Also still trying to get used to the ending of daylight saving time that occurred last Sunday, November 2nd. I don’t care for the loss of daylight after work; however, I do understand the argument that it is safer for school children to have extra light in the morning. I would be fine if they just eliminated daylight saving time as opposed to making it permanent. Wednesday evening was the Full Beaver Super Moon, I got a really good view of it low to the horizon across a parking lot in Deer River before getting home from work.
FridaySaturday was the opening of deer hunting and also the traditional day Tiffany and Debra go shopping at the bizarre around town. They found some great Country Sourdough bread from Old Soul Artisan Bakery.
Meanwhile during the day, my annoying cold ramped up so I took a Abbott BinaxNOW Covid-19 Ag CARD test that indicated negative so that’s good. I am convinced my body knows my schedule and picks a set of days off to do this.
On Sunday, we were lucky enough to see a Red Cardinal in the Cedar tree next to our bird feeder. This is only the second Red Cardinal I have seen in our yard, the last one was on 10/26/2020.
🎮 Homebrewed Nintendo 3DS XL
Andrew initially formatted a 4 GB SD card as FAT32 so the 3DS and the exploit files could be read and written correctly. Andrew ordered, and later switched to, a 32GB card. He then inserted the freshly formatted SD into the 3DS, opened Mii Maker, let it create and copy the HOME/Mii extdata to the card, then closed Mii Maker—this gives MSET9 the account extdata it needs to prepare the hack.
He then inserted the SD card back into his Mac and copied all of the MSET9 / payload files into the SD root. MSET9 is part of the exploit toolkit MSET9 developed by zoogie, with major contributions from ToxicAven and Danny8376 (Danny AAM).
This was the point that I paused and thought about telling Andrew to stop because running a .command file downloaded from some guy with a strong foreign accent was about the stupidest thing we could do. But then I thought about my own tech learning experience and realized halting his project was an even worse idea. Besides, I was fairly certain I could reformat his Mac…
Andrew ran the .command file that executed mset9.py on his computer. He selected option 1 (sanity check) so the script could verify the SD was writable, required payload files were present, HOME/Mii extdata exist, and there was enough free space before he attempted anything risky, as if that line wasn’t already crossed.
He then put the SD back into the 3DS briefly so the console could write any final extdata, then reinserted it into his Mac so mset9.py could see the up-to-date files—this roundtrip ensures MSET9 will copy the correct extdata into the hacked account folder.
After reinserting the SD card back into his Mac, he ran mset9.py again and choose 2 (inject); the script copied databases/extdata into the hacked ID1 folder and wrote the trigger file. These are the files that the Download Play/banner exploit executes. I found a good community install guide for details that is available here.
Andrew then reinstalled the SD card into the 3DS, opened the SD’s folder (untitled folder), then launched Download Play and performed the exploit sequence, he then pressed Down+L+Select, (entered Miscellaneous options, switched the HB title to the current app, backed out with B, B, B, pressed Home, pressed X to exit, then re-opened Download Play) so the console loads the payload from the SD and runs the Homebrew Launcher/FBI. Here is a link to some information about the FBI application.
When the payload ran, he got both the FBI and the Homebrew Launcher; he opened FBI, pressed A to select the CD, went into CIAs, choose the current directory, selected Install and deleted all CIAs, pressed A, and when it finished pressed Home then X. Done
You should have a full NAND backup, we didn’t, and follow an up-to-date guide which is available here before attempting to do what he did.
End of blog. Thank you for reading!
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