(MAJOR UPDATE: ONLY 10 HRS REMAIN BEFORE SHUT DOWN AT TIME OF WRITING THIS UPDATE)
Hello everyone. For everyone who owns a 3DS, 2DS, or even a Wii U, I’m sharing this out to as many places I can think of, where the awareness can make an impact. Please read if you own a 3DS or Wii U at all, or know anybody who does:
The SpotPass servers by Nintendo will be shutting down on April 8th, 2024 (4PM PDT). The SpotPass Archival Project has been created by the 3DS and Wii U Homebrew modding community, to make sure as much SpotPass data as humanly possible is preserved for the foreseeable future and not lost forever in the coming few days. A huge amount of SpotPass content is essentially free DLC for various games and apps, and they could have been installed without your knowledge. They are not required for most games to play, but without their archival, many games will lose DLC content permanently and some features may no longer work. This archival project can only be made possible by the donations of any individuals owning a 3DS or Wii U (not a donation of money, but rather a donation of SpotPass data stored on your system)
This data can only be collected before April 8th. Any and all dumps made or sent after the end-date will be useless due to the nature of how the archive process works. The dump does not require you to have a modded or Homebrewed console, and can be done completely unmodded. All you need extra as an unmodded user, is a PC or laptop. There is also zero risk of having your console banned; so rest assured. The guides can be found here: https://spotpassarchive.github.io/#guides.
Update: For those who can’t recall the difference, what we’re archiving here is SpotPass, not StreetPass. The difference between the two are: StreetPass: Is a 3DS exclusive offline wireless tech which connects your 3DS to other systems and shares various bits of data with random people you pass on the street (in the real world). For example, in the game StreetPass Mii Plaza, the data sent to random passers are your Mii, along with your most recently played game, and your Mii can be played with in the various minigames that StreetPass Mii Plaza offers, and vice versa. SpotPass: Is an online wireless tech available on both the 3DS and Wii U. Unlike StreetPass, it does not connect to other 3DS systems directly, but rather connects to Nintendo’s SpotPass servers online. The data sent could be anything from notifications, to in-game content. This is what we’re archiving; not StreetPass data. Streetpass is not an online service, and thus does not lose content after April 8th; but SpotPass data will be lost after the 8th if it’s not archived. Wikipedia article.
Even if you make the dump before April 8, and send it to them afterwards, the dump will be useless regardless, this is why we are frantically trying to spread the word about the project as quickly as possible, as there is a lot of data that is still going to go away permanently regardless of the efforts of this project. The data is stored offline locally on your 3DS and Wii U, so you may be confused as to why you can’t just make the dump after the date. For a better explanation, here is a Discord message from the official Discord server which explains things. I am not a developer of the project, I’m just someone who is passionate about gaming and technology preservation, and wants to get this out there, and the 3DS was a wonderful part of my late childhood.
The data is going to be used by the developers to put towards developing a replacement for the SpotPass network, similar to what was done by the Homebrew community who created the Nintendo Network replacement, dubbed “Pretendo Network”.
Even if you don’t think you have much data on your system, please help dump it towards the archive as soon as possible (within the next couple of days), because you likely have some things you don’t know about. The process does not require a modded console at all, and the official site here, has instructions for both users of modded consoles, and users of unmodded consoles. You can ask for help in the official Discord server of the project here and people will be very willing to help.
There are also many many niche, lesser known games, which have absolutely no data archived for them still to this day, so any help archiving them is vital. Thanks for reading, and I ask you to also share this out to as many people as you possibly can. Even if you don’t own a 3DS or Wii U, please share this out to anyone you know who owns one, or even those whom you suspect might have one.
Edit: added some extra information, removed some no longer relevant information, fixed some typos, improved some wording slightly.
Hmm, not sure I’m going to be able to do it. I don’t have an SD card reader on my computer anymore… I do have an old ebook that could read it, but it might be a hassle getting everything shuffled around. Plus I need to figure out Python. Might have time for it tomorrow.
EDIT: This is a monumental hassle… my laptop can’t properly run the script it seems, CMD just auto-closes after trying to initialize the SD card, so I’m seeing if I can compress, upload to google drive, run it on my main computer, send back, then overwrite the SD card
EDIT2: It looks like I did the injection correctly, but the 2DS is stuck on a loading screen in the Extra Data Management page; the tutorial says “Follow the directions shown on the bottom screen.” :/
I used the modded method so I’m not sure I can help you personally, but the people over at Discord will be very willing to help. Here is an invite to the Discord https://discord.gg/bVpaR9EY so you can get help; I’m sure they can help you. Otherwise, there is another method listed on the site that doesn’t involve Python, but it only works on the New 3DS or New 2DS though. I don’t know if the method is any more or less difficult, though.
Ok, I went out and got an SD card reader (I needed one anyway for my dash cam). Less swapping seemed to do the job, got both my 2DS dump uploaded! Also just finished up with the WiiU spotpass dump :D
I appreciate you’ve gone to this much effort. Thankyou. I’m so sorry if this affects you. Because your message is 13 hrs ago, I will assume that you weren’t affected by this, so you likely don’t have to worry:
There was an announcement on the Discord by the maintainer of the server which the entire archive is stored on. He announced that he’d accidentally not noticed that the server storage-space had run out, from all the dumps being made. This means that for at least 4 hrs, all dumps made by contributors were not being received, even though they thought they had been. Here’s the screenshot of the post.
So the servers were first overfilled starting April 6, 12PM Pacific Daylight Time (PDT); and was fixed by the server maintainer at 4:08PM (PDT). However, all he knows is that the full amount of time the server was having this issue was “at least a 4 hrs”, so it could have started some hrs prior to 12PM; it could have even been the entire day for all he knows. I know this is annoying. I’m not officially a part of this project, I’m just spreading the word, but I’m still sorry for you if this affects you. If you think you made your dump within this time period, you will need to make the dump again. Otherwise, if you made the dump prior, but on the same day, it might be worth re-dumping, because your original dump may have not actually properly uploaded due to this mistake on the server-owners part.
Yeah actually I saw that discord message not two minutes after I submitted my 3ds data haha. Luckily I kept a copy of it, so it was easy to resubmit. Then resubmit again about an hour later~