Best GBA & DS Flash carts please?

Post by **4ppleseed** » Mon Mar 12, 2007 9:48 am

I'm looking to buy some GBA and DS flash carts. What's the biggest and best available? Recommendations please

Post by **Perseid** » Mon Mar 12, 2007 5:20 pm

The flash cart market is insane right now. There are over a dozen different options. www.scdev.org and www.gbatemp.net both have nice forums with cartridge reviews and stuff. But here's a small rundown of what I know.

There are slot 1 and slot 2 devices. Slot 1 is the slot that DS games go in, slot 2 is where the GBA games go. You can get a slot 2 device for both GBA games and DS games but you have to either flash your DS or buy a DS cartridge called a Superkey(or something like it) to trick the DS into booting DS code from slot 2. You can instead get a slot 1 device that boots directly so you don't have to mess with anything else. Unfortunately, though, a slot 1 won't give you any GBA compatibility at all.

I have a Supercard SD. It's a slot 2. I bought a used flashed DS so I don't have a superkey. It uses regular SD cards. Most games work fine. About 10% of GBA games have slowdown, sometimes in bad places. About 95% of DS games work fine but the intro in Castlevania DoS lags and Castlevania PoR doesn't work at all. It serves most of my needs well but there are now better alternatives for a similar price so I can't really recommend one today.

I just bought, but have yet to receive, an EZ5 bundle pack. This is a very new thing that is a slot 1 device that uses microSD cards and plays your DS games with rumble and also has a slot 2 cart that will copy GBA games from the microSD in the slot 1 thing and play them. Supposedly it has near 100% compatibility for both DS and GBA and is $60. But as I said, I don't actually have it yet so I can't vouch for it.

Things I've read point to the M3 Lite as the best slot 2 for GBA, but it's $70-$80, which is insane. And the R4 is the best slot 1 for DS compatibility, but it won't do GBA at all.

So - if you don't care about GBA, get an R4. If you want GBA like I do, things get more complicated.

Finally, I can vouch for www.realhotstuff.com as a pretty cool place to get this stuff. Fast shipping and a pretty cool guy. He doesn't carry everything, though. And if you poke around on scdev's forums there's a 5% off coupon code too.

Good luck. These days it seems like everybody in Hong Kong with a chip programmer is releasing a DS flash cart, but there are a few that stand out.

Post by **4ppleseed** » Tue Mar 13, 2007 7:13 am

That's great info thanks!

I had a little look via google and it was pretty overwhelming to say the least. 16gb cards??? Zikes ...!

I think I'm looking for a big GBA cart for slot 2 and a big cart for slot 1. One for each would be good.

I'll have a good look around this weekend via your links.

If anyone else can recommend a good GBA and DS cart it'd be good to hear too

Post by **retrogamer** » Tue Mar 13, 2007 9:42 am

That was a well written writeup and made it much easier for me to narrow down my choices. Which is the best card to play NES games on a GBA SP or NDS?

Post by **Perseid** » Tue Mar 13, 2007 1:01 pm

retrogamer wrote:That was a well written writeup and made it much easier for me to narrow down my choices. Which is the best card to play NES games on a GBA SP or NDS?

I don't really do a lot of emulation on the DS, but there is this site: http://wiki.scorpei.com/index.php/Main_Page

If you look at the compatibility lists there are homebrew lists at the bottom.

My Supercard SD has an NES emulator built into the hardware. I haven't messed with it too much but I did play Excitebike and it worked pretty well. On the other hand there is an NDS Atari 2600 emulator that I couldn't get to work at all on my Supercard. I think it comes down to which cards the homebrew author has had a chance to test on.

Post by **racketboy** » Wed Mar 14, 2007 7:26 am

I'd like to do emulation on my DS to see how it compares the the GP2X.
But I don't have that much cash to invest in it right now...

Post by **Perseid** » Wed Mar 14, 2007 1:18 pm

Don't worry. The GP2X wins hands down. Much faster. Bigger screen. Open platform. Better emulators. There are some good emulators for the DS but you won't be able to do things like NeoGeo or Amiga.

Post by **racketboy** » Wed Mar 14, 2007 4:29 pm

Perseid wrote:Don't worry. The GP2X wins hands down. Much faster. Bigger screen. Open platform. Better emulators. There are some good emulators for the DS but you won't be able to do things like NeoGeo or Amiga.

The GPX2 is faster? Good to know. I just wish there was a better SNES emulator.
But yeah, the screen is nice.

But I have to admit, it would be nice to have all my portable gaming on one device instead of having to switch between the two.

Post by **metaleggman** » Wed Mar 14, 2007 8:52 pm

I'd just get a M3 adapter and a Passkey for NDS stuff.
Passkey one
Passkey two
If you have a DS lite: Lite M3 Mini SD plus Passkey
M3 Compact Flash
M3 Mini SD
M3 SD version
Older M3 Mini SD, lite version
Older M3 Mini SD, pro version

If you want to get just gba stuff, I've heard the M3 isn't the best thing, BUT it is the best for NDS back-ups and emulation. Then again, the emulation on the DS kindof sucks...I think SNES is barely working, with only weird ways of getting it to play...

Post by **Pullmyfinger** » Thu Mar 15, 2007 12:19 pm

I got M3 Pro and M3 Simply, while it does emulate NES and GBA with a built in emu, it really kinda sucks, the M3 Simply is currently on my DS running DS games and the M3 Pro is on my GBA running GBA games, there are too many choices for those 2 systems, why even bother emulating? The games are slow, if it emulates properly, the text is still small and it's likely that the picture won't fit on the screen