Hi there!

My name is Pablo Curiel. I'm from Venezuela, but I'm currently living in Spain.

I'm an Electronic Engineer with a degree in Telecommunications, with a passion for low-level development. I love to tinker with videogame consoles, so most of my open source projects are related to homebrew development in one way or another.

I began this journey many years ago with Yet Another BlueDump Mod, a modification of the original BlueDump WAD dumper made by nicksasa for the Nintendo Wii. Back then, my only goal was to fix certain issues that plagued the original application (like implementing content dumping + AES-128-CBC crypto in chunks), but my changes ended up becoming rather big in the hopes of properly reproducing the way Nintendo generated their own WAD packages, as well as providing exciting QoL features like USB storage support, content.bin conversion to WADs and support for the Wii U's vWii mode. To my knowledge, the application is still being used to this very day.

I also developed wad2bin and fully documented the content.bin format used by the Nintendo Wii to store channel data on SD cards. This is the only public, open source tool capable of fully generating files in this format. Plus, I have an unofficial, modified version of the Wii key dumper xyzzy that was originally made by bushing back in 2008 - 2009, who sadly passed away in 2016. Through the years, nearly all code from the original project has been replaced -- however, bushing has always been a big inspiration for me, so I don't want to overshadow how important he still is to the project.

In the past few years, my focus has switched to the Nintendo Switch (no pun intended). I've developed homebrew libraries and applications such as nxdumptool and libusbhsfs, which have greatly assisted data preservation groups, dataminers and other homebrew developers in the community.

I have also created other small programs and scripts with different purposes, in the hopes of helping other people circumvent certain issues -- such as a N64 savedata converter, a 3DS EmuNAND manager, a Super Mario 64 save converter and so on.

I'm not a well-known developer, and I'm certainly not a hacker nor a skilled reverse-engineer -- there's much better people than me out there. I'm just someone who really likes what he does and pours his heart and soul into his projects, willing to learn new stuff in order to accomplish what he wants. Your sponsorship would be important because it would allow me to dedicate more time to my ongoing open source projects.

Thank you for taking the time to read this!

nxdumptool is, without a doubt, my biggest personal project so far. It's a full-fledged dumping and datamining homebrew application capable of:

• Dumping XCIs and certificates from physical Nintendo Switch gamecards.
• Generating NSPs from data available in the inserted SD card, the internal eMMC storage and or the inserted gamecard.
• Dumping data from the virtual filesystems available within NCAs, such as Partition FS and RomFS.
• Dumping individual tickets.

I have been rewriting the application since the ongoing SARS-CoV-2 pandemic started, in order to:

• Improve both its codebase readability and maintainability.
• Introduce a new borealis-powered UI.
• Add support for external USB mass storage devices through my very own libusbhsfs (mentioned above).
• Add support for data transfers to a connected USB host using a well-documented, minimalistic transfer protocol written from scratch.
• Add support for new features in the NCA specs introduced by Nintendo in the last few years, such as Sparse and Compressed NCA sections.
• Provide more gamecard-related features such as InitialData, CardIdSet, CardInfo and Lotus ASIC firmware (LAFW) dumping.

The new UI is still being developed, but in the meantime, proof-of-concept (PoC) builds have been made available in nxdumptool's Discord server to test all the new features that have already been finished. Anyone can freely join the server, grab these builds and try them out.