Nintendo DS Homebrew: What to buy?

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Diskeater

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After checking out the awesomeness that is http://www.collectingsmiles.com/colors/Colors!</a> I've decided to take the plunge and buy myself and my best friend (his birthday is coming up) Nintendo DS flash cards so we can run homebrew applications, emulators, and games. I'm just looking into this now and it seems like there are a ton of options so hopefully you guys can help me out.

- I want the best value for the dollar. Obviously, cheaper is better but if there is a better option that only costs a few bucks more, I'd go for that. However, I don't want to pay a lot of money for stuff I won't use.

- Media playback (music/videos/movies/pictures/whatever) is not a concern at all.

- Onboard memory isn't needed but I would like to have the option of adding external memory.

- Highest compatibility for commercial games. Download/online play isn't a concern.

- I'm assuming these things have firmware, so the ability to update that would be nice but is probably standard.

- Free blowjobs

- We are both very computer literate so if we have to patch any ROMs or modify the DS in any way we can do this, but the less fuss the better.

Any suggestions? Thanks!
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Let's see...as far as slot-1 cards (probably the most simple solution as you can just pop them in and go, cheaper probably as well), an R4 would be a good bet, one of the more popular cards right now. I'd look at the Supercard ONE also, as it now supports what is essentially savestates for DS games, which is not a common feature. They should both be around $40. Keep in mind you will need to get a memory card of some kind to use with it as well (I think both of these use microSD). Also keep in mind neither of these will have on-board memory and would have NO GBA compatibility.

For Slot-2 cards, I'm not sure, but I like my M3 slim version. Supports GBA games as well as NDS content, and has on-board RAM. That is good for stuff like DSlinux, a version of Quake can use it to load especially large mods, one of the SNES emulators uses it as a cache (though it's not required), stuff like that. Mine was more expensive than the ones I mentioned above, plus you would need something like Datel's Media Loader to load DS stuff from it, unless you hack your DS with FlashMe (which isn't a hard process).

I will note that you can get stuff such as the EZ 3-in-1, which is esentially a standalone RAM/Rumble pack, and there is software to use it for GBA from slot-1 cards...homebrew would be able to use it as well.

For the other questions:

-Moonshell supports everything through DLDI (I'll mention this below), so media playback is a given.

-Download Play, not sure about this, I know some cards are fine with it but some don't work. Online play isn't going to be affected, wether you have a ROM or not.

-All of these should be upgradeable, at least the ones I mentioned are I know for sure.

-I think they all need to patch the ROMs in some way, but easiest might be the slot-1 cards. I'm not really sure there though, as I don't have one, and the patching for my slot-2 card is really simple.


Ok, now, DLDI stands for 'Dynamically Linked Disc Interface'. What this means is that any homebrew supporting DLDI (read: most homebrew unless it doesn't need disk access or is old old homebrew) can be patched to support memory card access on any of the flash carts that have a DLDI driver, which is most.

It isn't hard either, you can get a program called DLDIrc that lets you right click an NDS file and patch it quick and easy.

*edit*
Oh yeah, some cards support autopatching for DLDI compatible stuff. You'd have to check the instructions for each individual card there.
*edit*

Another note....RAM packs, if something supports any RAM paks it should support them all, so far as I know since the libraries for those things apparently handle all of them.
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Yeah, I'm probably going to go for a slot-1 card. The improved battery life is what sold me.

It looks like the R4 and M3DS Simply are the exact same thing...is this true?
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> It looks like the R4 and M3DS Simply are the exact same
> thing...is this true?

They are. I guess the interface is somewhat different, but apparently you can 'convert' the M3 Simply into an R4. I presume there is some trickery involved there, but that answers the question pretty well. :)
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Very cool....I'll definitely be picking up something shortly. Thanks for yout help!
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> I'm just looking into this now and it seems like there are a ton
> of options so hopefully you guys can help me out.

> - Free blowjobs

Vacuum cleaner
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