nxnative-easy/dm/games/01006F8002326000

Animal Crossing: New Horizons (01006F8002326000)

Update 3.0.3 (v2228224) over the base game, with the Happy Home Paradise add-on mounted. SDK 20.5.4. Nintendo EPD's own engine (code name Park; sead / agl / gsys, NintendoWare G3d / Ui2d / Vfx2 / Atk / Font, Havok, Pia and NEX for local and online play) on NVN. Modules main, subsdk0 (the SDK's movie library) and sdk. Plays on the iPhone; 30 fps, as on the Switch.

On the Mac: a new game through Tom Nook's counter (name entry on the game's own keyboard, birthday, look, hemisphere, island choice), the in-flight movie with its sound, the island's creation and the arrival (Timmy's welcome, the player at the dock under control); no red line but the ones below. 1.85 GB resident and 1.15 GB of Metal allocations at the dock.

What it needs

Setting	Where	Why
render_cond on	game.tsv	the game wraps its clears in render conditions that skip a target nothing drew into since its last clear, as Tears of the Kingdom does (0100F2C0115B6000). Without the key, four clear-only passes wiped the composite before the window copy at frame 900, and every frame came out black (the island probe and the loading icon were drawn into render targets)
sys_resource 0x0	game.tsv	the NPDM declares no system resource (META +0x14 = 0): nninitStartup sets a heap (3.09 GB)
4 GB layout: mem_reserve 0x100000000, mem_alias 0x10000000, mem_stack 0x10000000, app_pool 0xCD500000	game.tsv	256 MB in front + 256 MB alias region + 256 MB stack region + 3.25 GB heap region
mem_used 0x7a00000 (122 MB)	game.tsv	the rewritten modules are larger than the default 64 MB of used memory (main alone is 63 MB of text and 15 MB of bss); the NSP script's guess after the rewrite, which leaves a 3.09 GB heap
pad_layout full	game.tsv	the 3D layout: the D-pad holds the tool ring and the right stick turns the camera
shader_groups /Shader/ /System/ /Effect/ /Model/ /Layout/ /Swkbd/	game.tsv	see Files and shaders

Rewriter

• Resolved: a B() assertion at a spin wait, a branch into the patch area beyond the ±128 MB a b reaches. Its main was the first module to put branches out of range of the patch area: 63 MB of text and 51 halfword jump tables (ldrh wE, [xT, xI, lsl #1]; …; adr x18, #L; add x18, x18, xE, lsl #2; br x18). Each got a landing pad for every one of the 65,536 values an entry can hold (768 KB a table), whatever the switch's size: 40 MB, and the spin-wait stubs placed after them were out of reach. half_count now pads only up to a table's largest entry; 7 of the 51 cannot be read and keep all 65,536. The patch area went from 42 MB to 7.9 MB.
• The spin-wait search through stores finds 166 loops in main (162 before), and the movie library's thread loop is wider in subsdk0 (development.md, Power).

Threads

• Resolved: a black screen with the plane icon for 77 s after the opening movie (also about 40 s of the same at boot), the CPU nearly idle. SaveProc yielded about 2,600 times a second, the power line's top yielder with as many back-off sleeps. The thread was working, not waiting: its grid walks over the new island (main+0x157d020) call nn::os::YieldThread once per cell, and the back-off made each yield a 250 µs sleep. A yield whose caller's x19–x28 changed since the last one now counts as progress and returns at once (thr_yield in hle_thread.c). The island now shows about 10 s after the movie, as with DM_YIELD_BACKOFF=0. A temporary log of which of x19–x28 move at each yield, per thread, told the working loops from the polls.

Services

• Resolved: abort in sm::Initialize under sf::hipc::InitializeHipcServiceResolution, right after the first frames (from main+0x5b8198). main links its own clients of olsc:u (cloud save data backup settings) and npns (push notifications), which talk HIPC through sm and svcSendSyncRequest. For each user the game asks whether backup is on and switches it off where it is (main+0x2809c8c); a failed connect aborts as well. hle_sf.c takes over the SDK's HIPC client entry points (InitializeHipcServiceResolution, ConnectToHipcService, SendSyncRequest, CloseClientSessionHandle and the control requests QueryPointerBufferSize, ConvertSessionToDomain, DuplicateSession(Ex)): olsc:u gets a host session, and every request on it succeeds with zeroed output, which reads as backup off for every user. Any other name is refused with a red line, as sm refuses a service nobody registered (npns was never connected). DM_SF_TRACE=1 dumps each request.
• Current: device save data. 3.0.3's main mounts no account save data; the island is in device save data (MountDeviceSaveData, GetDeviceSaveDataSize, ExtendDeviceSaveData), which the host gives the account save's host directory and transaction (one player). A second mount name over a save already mounted shares that mount's transaction (mount_ex); it used to clone the committed directory again, over the first name's pending writes. Also fs::Commit with a CommitOption (its one flag clears the restore flag) and GetSaveDataRestoreFlag (never restored from a backup). A game whose main imports MountSaveData too gets a device save of its own (Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, 0100152000022000); this game does not, so its islands stay where they are.
• Resolved (PR #25): fs::Commit(const char* const*, int), the mount-list overload. The SDK's own code opened fsp-srv and aborted, leaving the save writes uncommitted. The host commits the list as one transaction when every name is the same host save; cache and temporary storage in the list are skipped, and a list of two separate saves is refused without committing either.
• Found in main's imports before the first boot: the adjustable user clock (time::AdjustableUserSystemClock::GetCurrentTime, which the game's days follow) reads the time service's shared memory in the SDK (MonotonicSystemClock::GetCurrentTime, sdk+0x4421cc), which the host never maps, so it is the host's clock, as the user clock; time::GetStandardSteadyClockCurrentTimePoint, the free-function form of the steady clock; oe::GetRegionCode (from the language: Japan, the Americas, Europe or Hong Kong / Taiwan / Korea); the SDK 20 album calls SaveAndShareScreenshot with a share ID and GetSharePostedLastUrl (no album: they fail).

Saves

• A save is not reached on the Mac: the game first saves when the player sleeps at the end of the first day (the − menu says "You can't save right now." before that). Until then it only probes for main.dat, mainHeader.dat and Moved/personal.dat in its device save data.

Movies

• The in-flight movie Movie/OpeningMovie.webm is VP9 1080p with Vorbis, demuxed by movie::Extractor and decoded on the host (hle_movie.c).
• Resolved: the movie showed as a black screen with the loading icon, one picture every few seconds, while its sound decoder kept up. The player holds every output it is offered (16 of 16 video, 59 of 64 audio), so how far its extractor can get ahead of the picture on screen is the video slots plus the 4 queued packets. With 8 video slots that was 0.4 s, and the audio behind the next video packet, whose clock the player follows, ran dry: 86 pictures in 25 s. With 16 or 32 slots all 1,960 play at 30 fps. A video decoder now has 16 (MD_NOUT_VIDEO); a slot is allocated when first used, so the 8 more cost 24 MB of NV12 at 1080p only in a player that holds them all.

Files and shaders

• RomFS: 97,997 zstd files (.zs, most of them models), BWAV sound, a few Yaz0 SARC archives (.szs). The profile's romfs_marker is Movie/OpeningMovie.webm.
• Current: 9,766 BNSH programs: Shader/Park_UBER_All (3,385) and the other bfsha / sharcb in Shader/, agl's System/Agl/agl_resource (3,206), particle effects in Effect/ (2,522), models' own bfsha in Model/, layouts (bgsh) in Layout/, the game's keyboard in Swkbd/ and 40 in main.
• The keyboard's ocean background has 8 geometry shaders, which do not translate; the name entry draws without them.
• Prewarm list: recorded from a fresh save through the counter, the movie and the arrival to the dock (965 lines).

Mac routes

• From a fresh save, DM_KEYS="40:A*51/2,145:B*12/0.4,151:Down,152:Right*4/0.4,154.5:A,155.5:Right*4/0.4,158:A,159:Down*2/0.4,160.5:Left*2/0.4,162:A,163.5:Plus,167:A*4/2,175:Plus,178:A*146/2,179:Plus*30/4" names the player "tom" on the keyboard, takes the defaults, watches the movie and reaches the dock at about frame 14,100 (470 s).

Found on this game

General host changes first needed here; each applies to every game:

• Halfword jump tables padded to their largest entry (half_count in patch_nso.py): Halfword jump table landing pads sized to the largest entry.
• Yields that make progress return at once (thr_yield in hle_thread.c): Yields that make progress return at once (thr_yield) and development.md, Power ("Yield loops").
• The game's own HIPC clients answered by host sessions (hle_sf.c, DM_SF_TRACE), device save data and shared transactions (mount_ex), fs::Commit with a mount list or a CommitOption, and the adjustable user clock, region code and SDK 20 album and steady-clock calls: Game-linked HIPC clients of system services, Device save data on the account save's directory, fs::Commit with a list of mounts, Steady clock, clock snapshots and user clocks, Region code from the language, Album calls fail with no album.
• 16 output slots for video movie decoders (MD_NOUT_VIDEO in hle_movie.c): Video output slots: how far the extractor gets ahead.

Open

• game.tsv still describes the game as "In bring-up", while it plays on the iPhone.
• A save on the Mac (the end of the first day) has not been reached.
• The keyboard's 8 geometry shaders do not translate.