i was busy researching the insides of a nintendo ds cartridge and may have found a way to hack a ds cartridge on the back of the nintendo ds cartridge circuit board inside there are 4 to 6 golden prongs depend's on regon these prongs are labled as 1 2 6 7 on a us ds and labled 1 2 3 4 5 6 on a japanese ds my therory is to go out and purchase another demo of metroid prime first hunt take the cartridge a apart solder a usb cable to the connection's on the back plug it in and find out if the computer will read it i may or may not be able to try this for a week or even 2 month's as i am currently flat broke right now warning if you try this you will need a tube of super glue to put the cartridge back together
I think I speculated about writting to the cart with those 4 gold contacts weeks ago. The problem is the rom chips are mask rom (1 time write). So if you could find a blank cart, you might be able to write to it. Secondly, I really doubt the connection is usb. you need some sort of handler in between. Other people have made more progress on all of this and I'm just going to let the pros handle it.
well i tried it and i cannot access anything but at least it was a first step my next step is building a nintendo ds to gba converter i found a very intersting simularty between the tracers on the circuit board of the gba cartridge and the nintendo ds cartridge so my plans are quite simple solder a connecter to the gba cartridge the plug the ds cartridge into the gba cartridge and see if i could back it up... right now darkfader at darkfader.net/ds has figured out how to hack the nintendo ds using a gba flash reader and a weird messed up circuit board looking thingy he built
First, MaskRoms are called that for a reason. They are constructed from a Mask, similar to how discs are pressed with a Glass Master. They are never "written to". PROMs are what you are thinking. PROMs are written/burned once. EPROMs are UV light erasable. EEPROMs are totally electronically erasable. FlashRoms again are like EEPROMs and can be written many times. About Nintendo DS, you should know DarkFader has found the games are encrypted, and unless you handle it, you will get invalid data anyawy. Plus even if you get the card connected you must code your own dumping software. Unless you are good at this (taken a Computer Science course and then some?) I wouldn't start with the Nintendo DS. Nintendo has no doubt put some money and effort into trying to slow down any developments of FlashCards which plagued the GameBoy Advance.