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I was recently motivated to see there was any way to recreate mystery gift events that were distributed for the 3DS Pokemon Games. Knowing that fan made servers had been created for the DS Pokemon games (See wiimmfi and Poke Classic Network) - I wondered whether it was possible to do the same for the later games. Setting up a MITM server My first hurdle was to configure a 3DS so that SSL packets could be inspected....

If you wish to intercept packets and hack around with 3DS networking you may need to disable SSL verification so that you can snoop inside SSL requests and responses. SciresM on GitHub had thankfully already figured out which bytes to patch in order to do this system wide. However, a lot of the instructions attached are a bit out of date for the state of Homebrew in 2023. Luma has changed a bit since this patch was written and now allows for patching of system titles without rebuilding Luma!...

As part of my journey to reverse engineer Pokemon Mystery Gifts, I needed to be able to patch a 3DS System Module. This post will cover how I downloaded official binaries from Nintendo and extracted them for patching. Download To download a CIA you can use my download-cia tool that can download a given title id and version from Nintendo’s servers. Full instructions are in the project README. But as an example....

You may require a macOS installation to automatically login on boot (E.g. a server machine with launch services). However, for a little extra security you may want the system to login and immediately lock. Although this is not completely secure - if someone has access to your physical machine you’ve already lost. This just prevents someone walking past the machine and noticing it’s unlocked. ...

I like the look of the dark Mac dock and menubar but prefer light mode Windows. Thankfully this is possible to setup! defaults write -g NSRequiresAquaSystemAppearance -bool Yes defaults write com.apple.notificationcenterui NSRequiresAquaSystemAppearance -bool No The above forces windows and Notification Center top use light mode when in dark mode. Now simply change to dark mode and log out and back in! To return to defaults: defaults write -g NSRequiresAquaSystemAppearance -bool No defaults write com....