Nintendo DS Cards

We’ve got a group test for three Nintendo DS homebrew cartridge systems, namely the CycloDS Evolution, R4 Revolution and the Supercard SD. We tested all the cards on an old NDS (the bulky silver ones).

So what purpose do all these cards serve? Well they can all pretty much run games, homebrew applications (messenger clients over wifi etc.), emulate ROM’s (NES, PC Engine, SMS) and ready ebooks, even play MP3’s or movies! For the more adventurous of you, there is even a LinuxDS distribution out there!

CycloDS Evolution

This card is presented nicely, looks the business in its metal case and sponge inlay. Looks great for a gift this coming Christmas season! If you are intending to buy it, order soon as stock is sold out as soon as new batches come in it seems!

Easy to get up and running, you just insert a MicroSD card into the Slot 1 NDS sized CycloDS card and you’re off. The cream coloured card fits perfectly in to the NDS without any overhang.

A neat (if tiny!) USB MicroSD card reader is supplied for getting your files from the computer on to the card. However most MicroSD cards you buy come with an SD card adapter, allowing nearly every multi media card reader to work with a MicroSD card.

Additional features include a in-game LCD brightness adjustment, SlowMotion mode and in-game reset. Further to this is a inbuilt cheat code system to enjoy more freedom with your favorite games, and its compatible with Action Replay codes! The CycloDS Evolution comes bundled with cheat codes for over 300 games to get you rolling.

Testing the game/demo sharing capabilities of the NDS with the CycloDS Evo proved successful - I was able to send a copy of a game to a friend who had no CycloDS card and we could play head to head until he powered off his NDS. On the downside the NDS Browser just would not work, and insisted in a memory expansion pack being inserted.

The user interface looks sleek and polished. There’s also the ability to install your own skins to personalise your NDS.

The CycloDS Evo also supports the MicroSDHC specification, allowing for high capacity memory cards - we tested with a 1GB and 2GB Kingston card.

Something that didn’t come in the box was any documentation, especially on how to use the special features. So you might like to check out the CycloDS Evolution documentation (PDF). According to the bottom of the presentation tin i should have received some instructions of some sort - maybe they were missing i n the review copy.

Supercard SD

The oldest in the group test, the Supercard SD has a few pre-requisites - a flashed NDS firmware and an original NDS game cartridge present in the slot 1. The Supercard SD sits in the GBA slot at the bottom of the NDS, and rather ugly - hangs out the bottom ruining your slick NDS look.

The bigger GBA cartridge allows the use of the larger SD card - which means its slightly easier to transfer files to the SD card because no adapters are needed like the above.

The user interface menu is basic but quick to find and select a file and run it. All files being executed on the Supercard first require patching using the supplied MS Windows only software.

A problem I encountered whilst using the Supercard is sharing a game over wireless. It just doesn’t work! I suspect this might be linked with the NDS file being patched before it woudl run?

R4 Revolution

The R4 is a re-badged M3 device, so offers the same compatibility and features. The package comes with documentation and software on a mini CD, a carry case for the NDS cartridge and a MicroSD USB card reader.

The first stumbling block was the out of the box experience. Upon turning on the NDS the R4 complained with an error message about needing some custom files copying on to the MicroSD card - not a nice start. Once the required files had been copied from the CD the R4 operated fine. The GUI functioned fine but the icons were a little cryptic - and probably violated copyright with using the Apple Mac face and (i think) and an MSN character!

The R4 CD also contained a quite nifty MS Windows application called the “Trimmer”. This allowed you to reduce any ROM dump files (*.nds files) to a smaller file size. It worked by deleting all the empty space from the file which the game/software was not actually using. This often reduced files by 30% meaning you could fit a lot more on to your MicroSD card.

However - from a bit of research it seems the R4 Trimmer software can be bad, and ruin ROM images that use the NDS Wifi capabilities.

Like the CycloDS Evo, the R4 also supports the MicroSDHC specification for high capacity storage cards.

The CycloDS Evo looks slicker in presentation, but the R4 offers identical functionality at a slightly lower price point and has higher availability (at present).

Conclusion

One feature that all the cards in this group test lack is support for automatically running NDS files from within a ZIP archive format. This would increase the amount of storage space on a MicroSD card. The ZIP compression format isn’t intensive and could be handled nicely by the NDS hardware.

For sheer ease of use and overall product polish the CycloDS wins hands down, at a few quid more its a nice to have. If you want the best possible price then the R4 is easy to get hold of and technically works just as well.

Both the CycloDS Evolution (£33.99) & R4 (£30.99) are available from techwizad.com

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