R4 Cartridge for DS/DS Lite

[Saga]

Just bought one online a little over a week ago, waiting on it to get here. I've heard great things about it, but does anyone here have any personal experience with it? Or know a good online website that acts as a bit of a tutorial for putting DS Games/SNES Emulators and music on it and stuff? I'm really excited because I hear it can do a lot, I just want to get the most out of it. I ordered a 2GB micro SD card with it, btw. Thanks.

[Noobta]

I've had one since June and haven't had any big problems with it. The only game that wouldn't work for me is Castlevania: PoR. Putting games on it is easy, you just drag and drop it into a folder. I don't think you can emulate on it though.

[Kiarax]

Everything is pretty much just a case of drag and drop, it's all extremely simple.

What you will want to do though, is download a rom trimmer. DS games abide to cartridge sizes, so all games will be 32, 64, 128, etc MB by default. If a game was 40 MB for instance, they'd slap on 24 MB of junk data that just wastes room on your SD card. I use this one, all you do is drag and drop your rom onto the icon and it'll create a trimmed copy of it. It may not cut off much on alot of games but it really adds up.

Emulators is again just a case of dragging and dropping roms and running them through the homebrew program. It's been a while, but iirc the best ones are SNEmulDS for SNES, jenesis for the Genesis/Mega Drive and nesDS for NES. SNES and Genesis still need some work, but most games should run fine. NES is perfect from what I understand. I think it can run original Gameboy games (and maybe colour) but I've never looked into it myself. Should be able to find everything easily with some Googling.

[bebeci]

I've had one since June and haven't had any big problems with it. The only game that wouldn't work for me is Castlevania: PoR. Putting games on it is easy, you just drag and drop it into a folder. I don't think you can emulate on it though.

You may need to update your firmware for your r4.
I remember not being able to play a lot of the newer games (ie/ Mario Party DS) until I did so.

[Kiarax]

I think there's some sort of problem with certain SD cards that can cause Castlevania to crash, something about not reading the data as fast with certain brands or somesuch. They've always played fine for me with a Kingston SD card and a CycloDS but my friend with a different SD card but same flashcart/firmware had his game freezing frequently. But yeah, generally if a game doesn't work upon release they'll either fix it with a firmware update shortly after or some random will find a way around it via patching or an actionreplay code or something.

[Doombear]

Yeah i would say Castlevania is one of the few games that is pretty hit or miss, largely depending on Memory Card and Flash Cart. No problems with anything on my Cyclo + Transcend!

[Parshias]

I'll add that the ROM trimmer is a really good idea although there's a handful of games out there where trimming them fucks them up. Trimming Hotel Dusk for example caused it to freeze on a required puzzle about a third of the way in. Although I'd say that probably 98% of ROMs work fine after you trim them.

[octopus]

I have an M3, but they're pretty much the same thing anyway. These things are awesome.

[Saga]

Great, thanks for all the replies, good to know I made a solid investment. And pretty much any old DS rom site will work fine, yeah?

[Noobta]

I use GBA Roms, NDS Roms, We have all the Roms - The Epitome of Emulation!

[TheDirtyHobo]

R4 was probably a bad choice since I believe the R4 project was officially stopped a while back, without any updates you have chances of running into problems in the future. Though really, there's plenty of games out now that even if a game a year from now doesn't work, you'll still have a backlog of other games that you haven't beaten yet.

I got an M3 about a month ago and I'm absolutely loving it.

[Kiarax]

R4 has the biggest userbase. They've been coming out with fixes for games not working faster than firmware updates were released anyway (see FF:CC, it had some thing at the end of the first level saying "THANKS FOR PLAYING", people found ways around it with an AR code a day or two after it came out).

As for roms, DS-ROM-NEWS and Romulation are the fastest with new game releases. The latter has a point system, but it's only for anything over 75 MB so you should be fine to download anything you want with the 500 points you start with (I think it was 500, I've had an account for years now).

There's shedloads of sites where you can get homebrew apps, and hundreds of different homebrews available now, most are useless, but you should be able to find some sort of list of good ones easily through Google if you're interested in anything more than just games.

[Saga]

Phew, thanks Kiarax, I was worried for a second there. As far as updating the R4's firmware is concerned, I don't need an AR or anything extra do I? I assume it just does it wirelessly?

[Kiarax]

Uncertain of the exact process with the R4. But with most flashcarts it's just a case of downloading the firmware from their site, putting it on the SD and it'll update it when you boot it up. And they have AR support built in, you don't need any sort of external equipment, usually come preinstalled with cheats for older games, and then you can download cheat database updates and put them on manually when you want more for newer games.

[Saga]

Okay thanks, that makes a lot of sense.

[octopus]

As for games... I just use blackcats

[Dmitry]

For those of you that have done it, how hard was it to flash the DS Lite? I tried getting into this with my original DS but something got screwed up somewhere and my SD card didn't fit into the GBA adapter, or something. Killed morale and I didn't have money to order anything else. lol

Still kind of interested, just want to get an idea for the new system.

[Doombear]

Honestly? I see no reason TO flash the DS itself. Flash cards are much safer as they can in no way brick your DS that i know of. Sorry, no experience flashing the DS.

[Osede]

R4 was probably a bad choice since I believe the R4 project was officially stopped a while back, without any updates you have chances of running into problems in the future. Though really, there's plenty of games out now that even if a game a year from now doesn't work, you'll still have a backlog of other games that you haven't beaten yet.

I got an M3 about a month ago and I'm absolutely loving it.

nah, R4 was too good that it become so popular. So in the end Nintendo able to win in the court of sueing R4 for producing the chipset and catridge. End up they had to shut down all the manufactor in china lol

[octopus]

For those of you that have done it, how hard was it to flash the DS Lite? I tried getting into this with my original DS but something got screwed up somewhere and my SD card didn't fit into the GBA adapter, or something. Killed morale and I didn't have money to order anything else. lol

Still kind of interested, just want to get an idea for the new system.

Flash the DS...? R4 and M3 involves zero flashing and all files go into the mini SD card.