Hi, I'm David Walker, and I'm a developer at Nintendo. Because of this, I get a bunch of debug devices for the consoles. Just yesterday, I got what seemed to be a dubug system for the 3DS from my friend Tom Stoker.
I was excited to take it out and see what it
could do.
I took it out, but it wasn't working, so I charged it. After it was done charging, I turned it on.
It was hard getting a clear picture of the screen. It says: "AN ERROR OCCURED WHILE LOADING: NIN-CTR-FIRMWARE.BIN ERROR CODE: B00000101" (B00000111 means 7 in binary.)
I assumed the firmware image was corrupt. I plugged it in to my computer with a special cable that plugs into the port on the back of the 3DS. In case you don't know, the debug 3DS systems have two more pins in the power port to act a USB port. This allowed you to use the built-in system memory like a removeable drive. This was removed from the retail 3DS because of how easy it is to upload and download roms. I loaded the latest firmware onto my debug system, but it still didn't work. I called Tom.
- Dave: Hey, Tom? The debug 3DS you gave me isn't working.
- Tom: Well, that's strange... What error is it giving you?
- Dave: Number 7.
- Tom: Well, crap. I don't know what to tell you.
- Tom hangs up abruptly
- Dave: Well, that was impolite.
Well, Tom was no help. I decided to look online for a way to fix this. It turned up no results. I scavenged around and found my book for debugging nintendo systems. 3DS error 7 was nowhere to be found. I just started using random button combos and START+SELECT+L+R finally made it work. Well, sort of. All the pre-installed software was gone, but I wasn't surprised. I plugged it back into my computer. The 3DS wrote a file called 796F7574752E62652F7A325A533876794D743659.EXE. I ran it on my computer
- The computer screen fades to black
- Computer: Why did you kill him?
- Dave: What? Who?
- The computer dosen't respond
- The screen fades back to normal
I had no idea who it was talking about, so I just tried to forget about it. I loaded the software onto the 3DS. I tried running Mii Maker.
- The screens fade to black
- 3DS: YOU DIDN'T ANSWER MY QUESTION.
- Dave: Well, I can't if I don't know who you're talking about!
- The Mii Maker starts
What the fuck? I would never kill a person. Heck, my crime record is clean. How clean?
"You could spill pure water on it, scoop it up and it'll still be pure" clean. I have no hate against any person in the world, either. I would NEVER, EVER kill someone.
I tried to start my webcam and take some video, but all my camera output was this. After that, I decided to play some Kirby Mass Attack. The screen faded and said just this "596f75206b696c6c6564204d6172696f2e" I was lucky it waited until I pressed a button before it went away.
I converted the hex to ascii. "You killed Mario." It was all making sense now. It's talking about all the times I made Mario die in NSMB Wii. I died over, and over trying to save the Princess. But, why was it specifically asking me? There are millions of other people that play this game! Why is it asking me? I was getting sleepy and decided to got to bed.
The next day, I went back to the Nintendo building. My friend Tom found me and said...
- Tom: Hey, sorry. THIS is the debug system I meant to give you. The one I gave you was broken.
- Dave: What was wrong with it?
- Tom: A broken parallel bus to the system memory. Oh, I gotta go. See ya!
- Tom leaves
It was defective? But it kind of worked after I messed with it a little... I opened up the system. Like he said, there WAS a broken parallel bus connected to the memory. Not only that, the ribbon cable going to the top half of the system was also broken. It couldn't possibly work in this condition, but it did.
Later, I was asked to code a death animation for a new Mario game, then it hit me! I am a developer. I make things in video games. Mostly animations, that includes death animations. I am the reason why Mario can die. It all makes sense, except for how the debug 3DS worked. I sent it back to Tom and he couldn't get it working. Now, I finally understand why it asked me, but I can't figure out how it asked me.