Gaming The Nintendo Zone "Debugger"

[MaxiBash]

Here's another neat DSi devapplication found and dumped in July of this year that I forgot to mention, so it went under the radar. And for an app that was forgotten for 5 months, I'm glad it was forgotten, because thanks to @shutterbug2000 and Billy, they were able to find a hidden debug menu me and Voodooween overlooked, containing a bunch of features that were lost because there are no active Nintendo Zone servers.

Now usually I would screenshot everything from an emulator, but No$GBA does not support Nintendo Zone,

and the Nintendo Zone Debugger sure isn't an exception.
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The Debugger boots up to this beautiful menu which, by looking at the rom itself, is just a group of quickly put together HTML files supported by the DSi.

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Selecting the server on the "JP SERVERS" list goes straight to regular Nintendo Zone.

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Aww man, this is boring!
I know, I know. Lets go back and see what the first option is about.

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...That's more like it!
This app can in fact read custom HTML files from SD Card, making the app pretend it's online, while it's always offline. All the HTML files from this mene are read from the file locations "sdmc:/zone_contents/index.html" and "sdmc:/zone_contents/index_up.html" (for the top screen). You can see the HTML files right here:

The thing we are most interested in is the "Debugging Page", which we'll get onto in a bit. The "Common" list are the pages that can also be found on a regular Nintendo Zone app. They're your standart Nintendo Zone screens telling you to search for Nintendo Zones. The "Debug" list is the same as the screen you boot up to on this Debugger, except for the "Debugging Page". But then there's "Nintendo Zone Servers" and... Chinese and Korean servers?

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Yeah, going further in the rom, we found out that somehow, Nintendo was smart enough to leave in links indicating that they were working on Nintendo Zone for Korea and China (so, iQue Zone?) But, just like all the other Nintendo Zone links, they're dead. Bummer!

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Here is the "Debugger Page"! It contains all features and tricks that the Nintendo Zone webpages can pull off, but now it's all baked into 1 rom. I'm not going to cover every single testing page (at least for now), just some of the stuff that I find interesting. I mean come on, I would love to perform an...

Update Cheack.
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TWL Dialog Check
This page can trigger messages and error codes to check if they exist in the rom. Some of these error messages don't even exist in the rom anymore, so they display a blank text box.

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"To use Nintendo Zone, you need to update your console. Do you want to perform a system update?"
[blank]
"The DS Download Play functionality from the main unit has been restricted by Bear Rental Control." (Bear Rental Control? No way Google Translate translated that properly.)

エラー画面チェック (Error Code Check)
You can trigger any error code from this menu and get redirected back to the offline Nintendo Zone page. That's it, really.

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Paint Test/With Background Picture
Sends you to the painting tool with the text "Background1". Nintendo Zone owners could replace this with any image they want.

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Font Test/sample_Eng.html
A set of pages with every symbol you can imagine. And hey, since Nintendo needs to test the font and how it lines up on a webpage, why not start talking about whatever Sony was up to in 2009?

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Auto Reload Test
Is exactly what it says. The pages refresh on the bottom after 10 seconds and on the top after 20 seconds.

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GIF Check
Shows a couple of GIFs and if they load or not. Isn't this GIF from Windows?

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ドエラー行番号 (Error Line Number)
Another page that shows error codes, now with descriptions on what the error is about.

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That was just me scraping the surface of the rom. There's still a bunch of debug strings and text mentioning the TWLSDK. Maybe I'll post that here for another day, when No$GBA lets me... yknow...

What's also interesting is the console this rom was dumped from. It's a regular Nintendo DSi Panda, just with a couple of extra stickers on the back.

There is a sticker on the bottom translating to "Local SD Card version (index route)", but what caught my eye is the NWD sticker, which is the exact same sticker seen on the FCC Nintendo Zone Box.

Yet, nobody knows what "NWD" stands for. Some rumours have been floating around it stands for "Nintendo Wifi Development", or "Nintendo Wifi Department", because all of this was kept in-house by Nintendo. Who knows, maybe we'll never figure it out. One thing is for sure, there is no text related to NWD in the rom.

Well, it was quite fun to make a rushed GBAtemp post, just talking about something that I like or something that deserves more attention. Let me know if I should make more of these posts, that is, if more dev stuff will surface for the DS in 2020. Who knows. I'm out!

 

[Pk11]

A few of your translations were a bit off so I figured I'd try to translate them better:
My Japanese isn't great but its at least a bit better than Google picture translate if that's what you were using ;P

Bear Rental Control." (Bear Rental Control? No way Google Translate translated that properly.)

ペアレンタルコントロール is "Parental controls" (Google messed up ぺ with べ )

エラー画面チェック (Error Code Check)

エラー画面チェック is "Error screen check"

ドエラー行番号 (Error Line Number)

エラー行番号の確認 is "Error line number confirmation" or so