DS Homebrew Backup Solutions

[ducktapevoodoo]

divineo.com has a good selection and i have ordered a xenium gold and a r4 from them both times they shipped fast

http://www.divineo.com/cgi-bin/div-us/cat_nds.html

[Mozgus]

And when you say "bigger games", do you mean the larger GBA titles? Do you know what the cutoff size is?
Also, what's the most afforable and practical solution for playing GBA ROMs on my Cube's GBA Player?

I believe the largest official GBA game size was 256Mbit, and only a few titles reached that. Yggdra Union was one. I very rarely needed to fill my 256MBit cart up entirely on one game.

[Perseid]

realhotstuff is cool. They're legit and fast.

The EZ-5 3-in-1 expansion can be used with the R4 but I recall hearing that some of the bigger games didn't work unless you have an EZ5(which I don't really recommend). They are about to release the M3Real which is apparently going to be the end-all-be-all of flash carts and it also going to have a GBA adaptor of its own, so you might want to wait and see how that pans out. Either way you don't copy GBA games from your PC. You copy them to the same SD card you have in the slot-1 cartridge and use that to copy games to the slot-2 cart and manage save files.

OK -- that helps. How long before that M3Real?
And when you say "bigger games", do you mean the larger GBA titles? Do you know what the cutoff size is?
Also, what's the most afforable and practical solution for playing GBA ROMs on my Cube's GBA Player?

I can't find any info on the GBA ROM size limitation. I may or may not be mistaken. The M3Real people haven't given an official street date, but it should be soon since it's out in Chinese and English test carts have been sent to some review sites. The only reason the 3in1 and the M3Real adaptor won't work on a Cube, Fat DS or GBA is that the cartridge is too small, made to fit exactly into a DS Lite. I have a Supercard SD which I have tried in my own Cube and it does work, but unfortunately it only has about 80% compatibility with GBA games and the rest have moderate to severe slowdown. An alternative to this is the M3 which is said to have 100% GBA compatibility but is $72. Yikes.

There's lots of info for this stuff on the forums for scdev.org. It's a nice friendly place kind of like this one.

[racketboy]

realhotstuff is cool. They're legit and fast.

The EZ-5 3-in-1 expansion can be used with the R4 but I recall hearing that some of the bigger games didn't work unless you have an EZ5(which I don't really recommend). They are about to release the M3Real which is apparently going to be the end-all-be-all of flash carts and it also going to have a GBA adaptor of its own, so you might want to wait and see how that pans out. Either way you don't copy GBA games from your PC. You copy them to the same SD card you have in the slot-1 cartridge and use that to copy games to the slot-2 cart and manage save files.

OK -- that helps. How long before that M3Real?
And when you say "bigger games", do you mean the larger GBA titles? Do you know what the cutoff size is?
Also, what's the most afforable and practical solution for playing GBA ROMs on my Cube's GBA Player?

I can't find any info on the GBA ROM size limitation. I may or may not be mistaken. The M3Real people haven't given an official street date, but it should be soon since it's out in Chinese and English test carts have been sent to some review sites. The only reason the 3in1 and the M3Real adaptor won't work on a Cube, Fat DS or GBA is that the cartridge is too small, made to fit exactly into a DS Lite. I have a Supercard SD which I have tried in my own Cube and it does work, but unfortunately it only has about 80% compatibility with GBA games and the rest have moderate to severe slowdown. An alternative to this is the M3 which is said to have 100% GBA compatibility but is $72. Yikes.

There's lots of info for this stuff on the forums for scdev.org. It's a nice friendly place kind of like this one.

OK -- so what do you use personally?

[nightwalker]

Well just giving my opinion I use the m3 simply its does what the name says. Play all your ds roms with full speed 100% and cheap and its upgradable and very easy to do also. Also it serves as a passcard for my gba needs I use the ez flash 3 in 1 and im in love with it. It serves as a rumble pack (I laugh each time it trembles) as an expansion for the browser and gba emulation. And the best of all you can buy them for $60 both.

[Perseid]

I have an R4 that I use for the DS games. It's the most no-nonsense of the ones I've tried. No ROM patching needed, no save settings. It just works. No native GBA support, though. I also have an EZ-5 with the 3-in-1 expansion. It also does not require ROM patching for DS games, though it does for GBA games. The 3-in-1 also supports rumble and the browser RAM expansion, so it's the most do-everything setup of the ones I have. The 3-in-1 can only hold one GBA game, though, and copying is very slow - up to a minute for a large game. For DS games you have to set the save size. This is fine for most games as there is a save list you can download and put on your SD card. If you're trying to play a game that is too new to be on the list, though, you have to trial-and-error find the save size and use a special program to edit the save size list. This is really annoying. Finally I have a Supercard SD. It's the first flash cart I got and is the only slot-2-only cart I have. DS compatibility is about 95%, Castlevania - Portrait of Ruin being the only game I know of that simply will not work. Quite a few GBA games, though, have slowdown. Sometimes it's tolerable, sometimes its not. You can mix and match GBA and DS games on your SD card, though and games are pretty quick to come up. It also has some emulators(GB, SMS, NES and PCE I think) built in which is kinda fun. The Supercard also requires a flashed DS or a superkey in order to run DS games from slot-2 as do all slot-2 carts.

So, in summary, I use the Supercard SD for GBA games that work on it, the EZ-5 for GBA games that don't work on the Supercard and the browser and the R4 for everything else. That's why I want the M3Real to be good. I don't want to use 3 different carts that all have different strengths and weaknesses. This is also why I can't really recommend any of what I have to someone who wants GBA(if you don't need GBA, just get an R4 and be happy).

[Perseid]

Well just giving my opinion I use the m3 simply its does what the name says. Play all your ds roms with full speed 100% and cheap and its upgradable and very easy to do also. Also it serves as a passcard for my gba needs I use the ez flash 3 in 1 and im in love with it. It serves as a rumble pack (I laugh each time it trembles) as an expansion for the browser and gba emulation. And the best of all you can buy them for $60 both.

So what do you need to do to get the 3in1 to work on non-EZ5 carts and is there anything it can't do that it can on an EZ5?

[racketboy]

But I'm guessing the M3Real will be in short supply for a while due to demand...?

Besides that, If I were to get a R4 this next week, what would you recommend for a single Rumble/RAM/GBA slot 2 cart that fits flushly on a DS lite that comes in White?

[Perseid]

There's this: http://gbatemp.net/index.php?showtopic=35982 but it will have the same GBA compatibility problems as the other slot 2 supercards and won't do rumble or browser RAM. There is also one called the M3 Lite Perfect which I don't know much about: http://www.realhotstuff.com/lite-perfect-p-119.html I doubt it will do rumble and might be hackable into doing browser RAM with the R4, but holy crap, the price. That's all that I know of.

[racketboy]

There's this: http://gbatemp.net/index.php?showtopic=35982 but it will have the same GBA compatibility problems as the other slot 2 supercards and won't do rumble or browser RAM. There is also one called the M3 Lite Perfect which I don't know much about: http://www.realhotstuff.com/lite-perfect-p-119.html I doubt it will do rumble and might be hackable into doing browser RAM with the R4, but holy crap, the price. That's all that I know of.

So wouldn't the EZFlash 3-in-1 be better?