Nintendo’s latest handheld is barely out of its wrappers in Japan, and it’s already been hacked to run pirated DS and GameBoy Color games off the notorious R4 cart – currently banned from (legal) sale all over the charted universe. I guess pirated 3DS games will probably be available in, oh, say a couple of hours.
According to a report over on geek.com, however, the modification required to load the R4 relies on an official whitelist of Nintendo-approved titles. The current list has been acquired by some doubtless nefarious means, but the exploit can apparently be fixed up by a firmware update. And then the whole cycle starts over again.
That original DS was subject to rampant piracy is putting it somewhat lightly, and Nintendo has allegedly put a lot of R&D into developing a system to combat this.
THQ’s Ian Curran has previously told CVG that, “I actually asked Nintendo to explain the technology and they said it’s very difficult to do so because it’s so sophisticated. They combated the piracy on Dsi, which they don’t believe is cracked yet – but they know they’ve been hurt across the world and they believe the 3DS has got technology that can stop that.”