nintendo ds lite modding?

[damien907]

so im thinking of getting a nintnendo ds and modding it to play

sega, snes, gbc, gba, and the like and of course putting some ds games on it so i dont have to lug around a thousand cartridges. one thing that i REALLY want to do is add nitrotracker onto my ds lite, so i can make music with it. the thought of making music on a portable machine is awesome to me.

could someone shed some light on this, i looked around this section and didnt find a ds hacking topic, and i also went to http://www.gbatemp.net and didnt really find a beginners guide to installing emulators/hacking on your ds lite.

ive gathered that i need to have a flash catridge that a sd card fits into, could anyone give recommendations on one that wont break the bank too much.

also, do you need the sd card physically plugged into the cartridge the whole time for your emu's ect. to work?

i wonder if there is a catridge that the sd card doesnt stick out the top.

anyway, thanks for all your replies in advance, im really excited to tackle a new system to hack, but i dont really know where to start with this one, it seems a bit more complex than the psp was.

also, i read somewhere that the supercard dstwo is the only card that will play gba games? is that correct? would this be the best card to get?

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[lacrimosaangel]

Your best bet would be to invest in something like an R4i or an Ackard2i or something similar. You'd put a micro sd into this and then load on all your .nds files, ebooks etc.
As for getting emulators to work, you'd need to download the emulator file onto your micro sd, (say picodrive.nds) and then load your roms through that, just as if you'd be starting a regular nds back up.

I would say however that using DS flashcarts to run emulators aren't really all that reliable due to the processing capabilities of the ds itself, and the read/write speeds of the micro sd.. Not all flashcards support SDHC either, so you need to be careful which one you choose.

I personally have an R4i Gold 3DS card and although I haven't tried to run emulators on this specific card, my original R4 wasn't much of a success.. They only cost about $25 though so it's not a huge amount to lose if it doesn't work as well as planned!

Just be careful where you buy them, there are a LOT of fakes out there! I get mine from r4ds-ds.com and they're usually pretty fast shipping and never had any issues with firmware or crashes

Think I'll go and test my R4i Gold out right now... I'll report back with how well it handles the emulation processes! (Oh and NB: wood r4 is the most solid fw I've found so far - way better than moonshell!)

ETA: and yes, you will have to have the sd/flashcard in your ds at all times if you wish to play the emulators. They don't run natively via the console like Apps and homebrew do, it's very much like running a standard ds game - you take it out, you can no longer access the software. There aren't any ds "hacks" that allow you to copy something into the native programming of the ds, neither can you "install" anything to the home menus, the only option I know of is the flashcard method - feel free to correct me if anyone knows different though, will be very interested if there's Core access out there somewhere.....

EDIT:
Lameboy0.12 seems to be working great on the R4i gold
Picodrive works well but there's slight frameskipping and it doesn't support sound..

will test the others out in a bit

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[damien907]

awesome, thanks for your reply man; i really appreciate it.

i will check more into the pieces that you bought for sure. i found this here: http://www.howtogeek.com/119273/how-to- ... e-machine/

and it says that the supercard DStwo has an onboard processor and cpu in the cart itself so you can run emulators easier. it also seems to support the microsdhc cards too. coming from psp and computer emulators, i really didnt know what to make of that until i read your reply and you said that the emulators dont work as well through the cards. everything kinda clicked into place for me after that.

i think i will probably get the dstwo for sure because of this. it also says the dstwo has an onboard gba and snes emulator that takes full advantage of the extra chips in it, this would be the way to go if you wanted to emulate on it.

thats cool that the gameboy works on your R4i, but that really worries me that the picodrive has no sound, one reason i want to do this is that i will have a sample library of sorts on my ds, so i can plug in the headphones output and record the sounds that way. (i make sample based hip hop beats, and i like sampling oldschool games, so being able to have a portable oldschool gaming sound library is huge for me).

if anyone else has any info, it would be awesome if you cold post here

[thunderz1337]

Your best bet would be to invest in something like an R4i or an Ackard2i or something similar. You'd put a micro sd into this and then load on all your .nds files, ebooks etc.
As for getting emulators to work, you'd need to download the emulator file onto your micro sd, (say picodrive.nds) and then load your roms through that, just as if you'd be starting a regular nds back up.

I would say however that using DS flashcarts to run emulators aren't really all that reliable due to the processing capabilities of the ds itself, and the read/write speeds of the micro sd.. Not all flashcards support SDHC either, so you need to be careful which one you choose.

I personally have an R4i Gold 3DS card and although I haven't tried to run emulators on this specific card, my original R4 wasn't much of a success.. They only cost about $25 though so it's not a huge amount to lose if it doesn't work as well as planned!

Just be careful where you buy them, there are a LOT of fakes out there! I get mine from r4ds-ds.com and they're usually pretty fast shipping and never had any issues with firmware or crashes

Think I'll go and test my R4i Gold out right now... I'll report back with how well it handles the emulation processes! (Oh and NB: wood r4 is the most solid fw I've found so far - way better than moonshell!)

ETA: and yes, you will have to have the sd/flashcard in your ds at all times if you wish to play the emulators. They don't run natively via the console like Apps and homebrew do, it's very much like running a standard ds game - you take it out, you can no longer access the software. There aren't any ds "hacks" that allow you to copy something into the native programming of the ds, neither can you "install" anything to the home menus, the only option I know of is the flashcard method - feel free to correct me if anyone knows different though, will be very interested if there's Core access out there somewhere.....

EDIT:
Lameboy0.12 seems to be working great on the R4i gold
Picodrive works well but there's slight frameskipping and it doesn't support sound..

will test the others out in a bit

do not invest in a acekard 2i their team hardly ever updates anymore

supercard dstwo is the best flashcart out atm and has a built in cpu that helps emulators and stuff.

[lacrimosaangel]

do not invest in a acekard 2i their team hardly ever updates anymore

supercard dstwo is the best flashcart out atm and has a built in cpu that helps emulators and stuff.

Yeah, I have an old acekard2i from a while ago - they've updated for the lastest 3ds firmware though, they're slightly slower than woodR4 are, but they're still slowly trickling in..
I still much prefer the r4i gold 3ds, loads amazing and is so simple to update.. Supports sdhc as well

Thanks for the supercard info, will have to look into that! If it's got greater emulation support, I'll definitely have to try it out

As for pico having no sound, there is an alternative called JEnesisDS which I'm just about to download so will test it and let you know..

EDIT:
JEnesisDS is pooey! It runs way faster than it should and there's a ton of graphical glitches, including black bars at the top/bottom of the screen, auto sizing is off so the full width of the screen isn't shown and there are major glitches with the graphics suddenly turning blocky and pixilated, resulting in not being able to play the games at all

On the plus side, you have full sound... but it's no good if you can't play the games >_<

[damien907]

cool, thanks for checking that out. i wonder if picodrive will have sound if it was played on the supercard dstwo?

could you navigate the menus with jenesisds? ie. go to the sound files that some games have in the options menu and play them through there?

thanks

[lacrimosaangel]

cool, thanks for checking that out. i wonder if picodrive will have sound if it was played on the supercard dstwo?

could you navigate the menus with jenesisds? ie. go to the sound files that some games have in the options menu and play them through there?

thanks

Picodrive doesn't have sound because the guy that was encoding the sound left the scene and he was the only one working on it and had all the encoding information so swapping out cards sadly won't let it work

You can navigate the Homebrew menu with jenesisds but trying to get to the game's specific menus are hit and miss, some games the graphics look okay except top and bottom, other games (sonic) are completely a no-go as they are just far too blocky and there's a lot of distortion on the screen.. I don't know whether it's just the 3ds or the r4i gold, I'll check on my ackard2i and my daughter's ds lite later, but I couldn't see the 3ds causing the problems!

[damien907]

ah i see. that sucks he just left and dindt develop the sound.

i got my ds lite today though

do you think this sdhc card would work well with the supercard dstwo? does it matter if it isnt the fastest card in the world? im thinking that the cpu ect is whats gonna be running the games and the card speed wont necessarily reflect on the quality of the emulators or games right? gonna buy a charger for my ds tommorow too, im really stoked to get it up and running.

here is the sdhc card im thinking of getting:

http://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-Class-Sec ... intendo+ds

[Kagaelus]

Get a Dstwo. realhotstuff.com may be a little spendier than other sites but reliable for me at least. Plays most GBA roms on down. SCUMM is really fun for the ds if you like old school point and click. Also an snes emulator but lacking. If you don't have the $40 for a Dstwo I would get a R4i gold or R4 SDHC Dual core as all three are currently supporting 4.5 the most current firmware for 3ds. now i understand that you have a ds lite but these cards will still work the best. best backup compatiblity!!! decent emulation capability. however dstwo is the the best as it plays gba games quite well without slot 2 support even;)
As for your sd card the faster the speed the better! most lexar or sandisk will work fine regardless of speed though. just my personal experience

[damien907]

so i finally got a supercard dstwo a copule days ago.

so far ive been able to add the gba emulator, the lameboy, and the ndssfc (snes) and catsfc (also snes).
i can get them to play fine, but the lameboy is the only one i can do "in game saves" in, as in not having to use the save state. is there a way i can use the "in game" save files to save on like the original games were supposed to be saved on? whenever i save on them, i turn off my ds, and they save file dissapeares. on the lameboy it was as easy as pushing "x" after i saved through the in game save system. but im not having any such luck on the snes or gba versions.

i really dislike having to use save states through the emulators, so i really want to find out a way to save in game on them all, is there any way to do this?

also, i have saved some DS games into a folder called "ds games" so i turn my system on, go to the "ds game" folder, open it up, and i see all of my ds games in there, but when i click on them the bottom screen just shows the dstwo "loading" graphic forever, and it will never start any of the games. is there a plugin i didnt copy to my _dstwoplugs folder to get this to work? i was under the impression it was just supposed to work when you clicked on a game. they are also all .nds files that i had unzipped too.
the only other thing i could think of is my micro sd card isnt fast enough? it was one that i bought through redhot stuff, so i would assume that my card would work right, wouldnt it?

thanks guys!