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The PassMe
When I arrived on the scene, there were about 6 people with expensive FPGA devkits that were able to run DS homebrew. DarkFader (Rafael Vuijk) was the first person to show the DS running hacked code where he had changed the text within Metroid Prime Demo. I was lucky enough to step into the middle of the PassMe design stage and received a copy of the printed circuit board (PCB) layout from Natrium42 (Alexei Karpenko). He had posted the plans on the Internet, and being that Sparkfun.com, who offered hobby based PCB prototyping services at the time, was asking me all the questions, such as why were they receiving orders for this same board, with the mistakes, that would lead me to believe I was the first person to order them. There were a few issues here and there with the current format and Natrium42 helped me sort them out and the PCBs were ordered.
The code on the PassMe used a simple insertion hack. The CPLD sat in between the DS slot and the commercial DS game. When the DS started, it would talk to the game card looking for authentication. Once this was complete, the inserted DS game would load into the 4MB of RAM in the DS and the header would tell the DS what memory address to start executing code from. Being that the GBA Slot (Slot-2) on the DS was directly accessible as memory locations on the DS, the CPLD would watch for the header information to be passed to the DS as it was loading. And when it saw the starting location it would insert it's own address as the DS loaded, what it believed to be, the memory location to start the official DS game card. This replacement address would be the GBA Slot where unlicensed (Homebrew) code would be run from.
A few weeks would pass, and the first PCBs arrived to my desk. First warning from Natrium42 was that a trace needed to be cut because of a mistake on the PCB. Once I cut the trace, I began soldering the CPLD and capacitors onto the PCB along with some broken off PCI pins from a computer motherboard to make a "socket" for the DS game to insert into. After I couldn't even get that board to work, frustrated that I either burned up the capacitors, that they were shorted, or something similar, I built a second one without the capacitors. That night, DarkFader and Natrium42 hacked the CPLD code to run homebrew from my EZF Advanced III GBA Flash cart. I posted a single message on gbadev.org showing that the PassMe was alive and real.. and went to bed.. Feeling great.
The next morning, I woke up to my name on the top of every NDS scene site as well as many tech sites. The feeling was overwhelming and the main reason I stayed in the scene. I never took credit for the PassMe. I always gave credit to DarkFader for the code and Natrium42 for the PassMe hardware. I have only taken credit for being the first person with a working version of it. And although I was only a channel for such a great and exciting event, the feeling of accomplishment was still there.
During this time, on IRC, Kraln (Jeff Katz) decided he was going to sell them. Numbers were tossed around and $15 for a PassMe was the price most thought was reasonable. Kraln also thought it was unneeded to provide a socket for people to insert a commercial NDS game into, stating that they could just solder it on. My stand was if an end user can solder the game to the PassMe, they can just purchase the parts and build it themselves. Natrium42 at the time had decided that he didn't want to sell them, so I figured I would also begin selling them. I decided to go with the original design Natrium42 put together along with some pins to hold the commercial game to the card. Kraln wanted to go with a single sided board to save on cost (or maximize profit, I don't know) and asked Natrium42 to create a single sided version. Natrium42, being the great guy that he is, obliged and provided Kraln with the Eagle files for a single sided version.
Next thing I know, Kraln is selling "Kraln.com PassMes".. He made modifications to the board that would cripple the design, but the most disrespectful part was taking ownership of the PassMe. It wasn't long before his Frankenstein PassMes were for sale on the web. I sat back and laughed as I saw pictures of hacked together PCBs with perf board glued to the back. See, one of the major modifications might not seem like a big deal when you think your users are going to solder their game to your board, but again, to save costs, he reduced the size of the PassMe. He removed the blank area past where the pins are soldered onto the PCB. This area was needed to support the commercial game that was to be inserted into the PassMe. This flaw would make it so that you couldn't create a "socket" for a commercial game to be inserted into. Apparently he realized that users didn't want to solder their game to the PassMe and he ended up with what he was selling. It wasn't a pretty sight.
On the other side, Natrium42 was designing a new version of the PCB that accepted a cut down Game Boy Connector (GBC). A quick search on the net would turn up these connectors for $2 each. Out of the blue, someone popped up on IRC trying to sell DS game sockets for something like $6 each and both Natrium42 and I passed on them. Seems these were sockets to be used by the notorious NeoFlash team (Who weren't notorious at this time), who were in the process of using DarkFader's code and Natrium42's PCB design. Natrium42 and I collaborated and I worked with a manufacturer out of China and spent around $2,500 on an order of GBCs. This is when I learned about customs and international orders. When you order $2,500 in little pieces of plastic, you have to deal with customs. $400 for shipping and a "Customs Agent" that did nothing more that fill out a few pieces of paper. But, either way, the GBCs were still cheaper this way than buying them for $2 each. I shipped a little over 500 of them to Natrium42 and began cutting them up for myself. Cutting the GBCs for our use was a tiresome task. Each one had to have two pins removed to make room for the band saw to cut through the plastic. After that, each one had to have the burrs removed. Once these steps were complete, the cut GBC was ready to have its 17 pins insert into a PassMe and soldered. Soldering was the easy part. The majority of the PassMes I sold with cut GBCs were sold for Christmas. This meant cutting hundreds of GBCs in my garage in the middle of winter. Chicago winters can be horrible and I spent many a nights with numb hands cutting GBCs to fulfill PassMe orders. To this day, I have around 2,300 GBCs sitting in my garage. I had sold a few cut, some uncut, but needless to say, they aren't in high demand.
