Well, I recieved two pressies today. First I got my powerbook back (long story) and second I received my R4 cart today. Here is my mini review:
What is it?
The R4 cart is a flash device that is one of many available today. Briefly, R4 and M3simply are effectively the same thing, and both are slot 1 carts. The other type are carts that use slot 2 (slot 1 is the top slot that accepts DS games, slot 2 is the bottom slot that accepts GBA games). The older types of cart required a booting tool and were called pass-me, whereas the newer slot 1 carts (like R4) do not require a seperate boot tool (called nopass).
So what do they do then?
Put simply, these devices allow you to run homebrew applications on your DS.
Unlike the PSP, the beauty of this system is that the homebrew runs directly off the cart. The DS firmware remains untouched and no firmware alteration is required. This means that when you remove the device from the DS, the DS is still in it's original condition, warranty intact and all
(unlike the PSP which loses it's warranty if you want to run homebrew as you have to flash the PSP hardware itself).
A more in depth discussion of general NDS homebrew is available
over here.
Who cares about homebrew?
Here is an appetizer of what you can play on your DS with homebrew:
Quake
lemmings
Doom
chess
Duke3D
warcraft III
Hexen
Also available are palm-like organisers, other OS's such as Linux, open source web browsers, text editors, ebook readers, instant messengers, media players (video's require converting to DS format beforehand - mp3's play fine
), and the ability to turn your DS into a wireless remote or pointing device.
The most interesting of these is the plethora of emulators available for it.
GBA, SNES, dreamcast, megadrive, NES, c64, zx spectrum, atari 2600 etc etc.
What you get
Back to my R4. It cost about £15 from dealextreme.com. Delivery was about 10 days from ordering. The item arrived well packaged too (shop is in US, but goods arrive direct from HK).
You get a silicone case + strap, setup disc (not needed.....read on to find out why), microSD card reader and the R4 card itself.
Here is a close up of the cart itself. You can clearly see the slot in which to insert the microSD card in the top:
The R4 doesn't come with a microSD card itself (although you can buy bundles with it included) so I got my 2Gb Sandisk one for £16 from amazon
.
You need a microSD card as the R4 is simply an adapter and software to run a separate booting system. You still need the storage as somewhere to stick the files....hence the need for a microSD card.
The reason you don't need the disc is that you can get the up-to-date kernel files for the R4 from their website directly (
www.r4ds.net). Simply unzip the file, drag and drop the contents to the miroSD card and away you go
. You also need to add in the latest cheat.dat file (also from the R4 website).
Beyond this, you may also want your own skins which you can easily make (16 or 24 bit bmp files, 256x192 size) and replace the existing 12 in the _system_ --> themes folder. You can manually switch between them in the R4 menu.
When you switch on the DS, you're now confronted with the R4 menu instead (shown here with a custom skin....you can download more from the net {search for nds themes or similar on google} if you don't want to make your own):
If you wish, you can also store
backups of games you already own.
I do not condone piracy so I won't tell you how to go about this. If you desperately want to have
backups alone, you can find plenty of info on the net on how to do it.
Back onto more legitimate uses of the cart, here is a C64 emulator called FrodoDS running some classics on the DS:
Ghosts'nGoblins & 1942 demoing:
.
I personally have about 40 or so old C64 tapes lying idle in my attic, so being able to play backups of them again is a dream come true
.
For any of the emulators you want, they usually need to be patched (called DLDi patching) to run on the R4 system, and again, these are freely available on the net. Once patched, you simply drag and drop the homebrew into a folder of your choice on the microSD card. For instance I have a folder called Homebrew on my microSD cart and run my open source homebrew from there. It's that easy. Much simpler than the messy "flash the firmware and risk a brick" method of my old PSP.
These are all run from the "games" icon on the left of the main R4 menu screen.
The middle icon "media" is used to run software called moonshell. This is included in the R4 kernel files and allows you to watch converted video's and listen to music on the DS.
On to the final icon on the right, "slot 2", boots up the slot 2 device if you have one inserted (either a GBA game or another flash device).
Summary For the total cost of a game, you can get a 2Gb microSD card and an R4 (or M3simply) slot 1 cart that allows you to run lots of apps from the ever growing field of homebrew on your DS.
Not everyone's cup of tea, but if you're into the programming side of things, or just enjoy the old-school/retro side of things, then it's a definite bonus to have.
Recommended.
DS homebrew scene.
.
(although apparently an improved version is in the pipeline).
) i'll be getting this 
thanks!
Linear Mode
