Solid Block of Ise

Back in January I turned 29, and as a kind of present I received a second-hand Nintendo DS from my friends Andreas and Johanna. It was a “long-time” loan of Johannas DS since she’d bought a DS Lite as a replacement for this. I immediately liked the little gaming device, and noticed that it had a lot of potential. Among other fun projects planned was seeing how difficult it would be to get Linux running on it.

Unfortunately it spent most part of the spring and summer collecting dust on one of the shelves. This wasn’t really the consoles fault, but rather that I only had one game (The Urbz, an incredibly boring game which I totally understand why Johanna happily parted ways with) and didn’t really have the finances to change this. This changed in May when I discovered something called R4DS. The R4DS (Revolution 4 DS) is a cartridge with a memory-card enabling the user to play both homebrew as well as downloaded/backup-games. Very cool! Unfortunately my very, very tight finances prevented me from investing in one of these things sooner, but it was worth the wait.

Add to this that almost none of the domestic as well as foreign suppliers had any of these in store - my guess is the demand for them vastly exceeded the supply - but at the end of July I noticed some suppliers started having them in store. During this time me and Ash was up north visiting parents and friends in Jokkmokk, but never the less I placed an order guessing it would be delivered just in time when we returned home again. Nope, it didn’t get shipped for some reason (my guess is a huge backlog of orders) and I promptly forgot that I had even ordered one.

At least I forgot until recently, when a mysterious package showed up on my doorstep. The contents was of course an R4DS. After some bried experimenting everything worked like a charm, and I have to say that this is one smooth and simple solution for people who want to run homebrew/downloaded games on their DS.

The two vital components are first the R4DS cartridge and secondly a tiny MicroSD flash-memory. The roms get copied onto the Micro-SD, which is inserted into the cartridge which in turn goes into the DS like any other game cartridge. A user-friendly menu enables browsing of the content. Apart from rom-games you can also use your DS as an MP3-player, ebook-reader or movie-viewer (after converting to a format the DS understands). The whole thing is extremely easy to use, all you need is the R4DS cartridge and a flash-memory. No passkey, no nothing. Battery-time and speed of games isn’t affected at all, which is also a nice bonus.

At first I planned on buying it from a domestic retailer called Chipper. However I found the prices there absolutely ludicrous, and with shipping the price for the thing would be outrageous. Instead I ordered my R4 from DealExtreme in Hong Kong. Sure, it took a little longer getting it when it shipped, but there was no cost for shipping and the price was very, very decent. When writing this an R4 including a 1 GB MicroSD from DealExtreme costs US$53, including shipping. When I ordered mine it was a bit cheaper, I think I paid somewhere around US$40 for my R4, including shipping and a 1 GB MicroSD. None the less the price was significantly cheaper than anywhere in Sweden. There was no problems with shipping either, the package was delivered as an ordinary letter.

This thing is an absolute must for any DS-owner.

(A minor observation: MicroSD sure makes good use of it’s name. If anyone told me five years ago that I’d have a gigabyte of storage the size of my pinky-nail I would have laughed my ass off)

UPDATE: For those of you who own an M3 Simply, it’s essentially the same thing. Different brand but virtually identical functionality.

(Not actual size.)

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(This is a translation and slight update/rewrite of my earlier Swedish-language posting from a few months ago. I feel that there’s a lot of writings in my previous three years that might be enjoyable to people who don’t understand the language. Postings that I’m a little extra proud of, and thus I’ve started translating a few of them for your questionable enjoyment.)

License

This work is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.5 Sweden License.