My experience with the R4DS

[Haldrie]

I've only had my new R4DS flash card for a couple of days now and already I've been able to do so much that I never imagined I would be able to when I first ordered it a little over a week ago. The R4DS is truely a wonderful piece of hardware and a must have for any DS owner no matter what you intend to do with it.

What you can do with the R4DS (what I've learned):

• Run homebrew roms on your DS without needing to use a passme to load it from a GBA flash card (patching required)
• Run commercial game roms without a passme
• Boot software in the GBA slot straight from the R4 menu with skinable border (can also be used as a passme to boot NDS software from the GBA cart, not tested since I don't have a GBA flash cart)
• Play MP3s (128kb/s with no ID3 tag information)
• Play DPG videos
• View JPEG images
• View TXT documents
• View eBooks (not tested yet only read about in R4 manual)

The R4 comes with the MoonShell OS which allows you to view and play media and the R4 and the MoonShell OS are both fully skinable and can be customized to suit your needs. All the software you need is included on a mini CD that comes with the R4. Just copy the files from the system folder on the disc to you microSD/transFlash card and the software is installed. Roms and other files can be stored anywhere on the memory stick except the system folders as those are hidden from view in the R4's menu.

The MP3 playback feature allows you to listen that any MP3 as long as it is 128kb/s and does not contain any ID3 tag information. If ID3 tag information is present on the MP3 file when it is loaded on the memory stick then the MP3 will not play correctly (personal experience and a lot of trial and error taught me this). The MoonShell OS will even continue to play the music even after you close the DS's screen and put it in sleep mode allowing you to use your DS as a portable MP3 player. Plug in your headphones, stick your DS in your pocket and jam .

Running homebrew roms for the DS requires you to patch them with the appropriate DLDI patch.

As for running commercial roms all you do is copy the uncompressed rom the your memory stick and load it into the R4. The R4 fully supports all features incluing Wi-Fi, microphone support and sleep mode support. I already tried a copy of Mario Kart DS on it and the Nintendo WFC servers couldn't tell the difference between my real copy and the rom on the R4.

The R4 also contains an in-game reset feature that can be turned on and off at will by pressing the R button or tapping on the R icon on the top-right on the touch screen before loading a rom. When turned on you can press L+R+A+B+X+Y to reset the R4 to the main menu no matter where you are in your game. This is a nice way to quickly switch roms without having to turn off your DS and turn it back on again.

I have managed to fit a total of 15 roms and about 25 MP3s on a 1GB microSD and still have space left over. Oh and for those of you who don't have a momory stick reader on your computer, the R4 comes with a USB microSD reader that lets you access you microSD memory stick through your USB drive so noone is left out.

So far every commercial game I've loaded on the R4 has run flawlessly including the Castlevania games and the new Pokemon Diamond and Pearl.

Feel free to ask me any questions and I will be glad to answer to the best of my knowledge.

[Kazekage Gaara]

I totally agree with you. R4 is a really good piece of hardware I have yet to find any commercial game that does NOT work with this thing, and I've tested almost 100+ NDS roms as of now let it be US, EU or Jap

Just finished playing Pokemon Diamond (my first pokemon game ever - on my first Nintendo handheld ever ). Now playing Rocket Slime and Sonic Rush

Edit: Oh and Haldrie. You forgot to mention. R4 saves your NDS gamesaves directly on your SD Micro Card so its pretty easy to manage them and back em up if you want

Also, the latest update for R4 enables you to use Action Replay cheats with this thing, which really increases the gameplay value or if you're stuck with a stupid boss that just wouldn't die You guys seriously need to check out the Action Replay codes of Super Mario Bros. They are just amazing ....they make me go muhahahahaha bowser style

[Cyberxion]

Hey, since you're going all out in an effort to turn us on to it, how about dropping a price for the thing? I know that I can search for that myself, but you're doing a commendable job here, and well, I'm lazy.

EDIT: I was too curious to wait, so I checked Divineo, and they have it for fourty-four bucks. Nice. I'm going to have to get myself one of these things. Well, after I get a DS of course.

[YoshiRiRu]

44 bucks plus however much for a microSD. Some of them come with card readers, however - so I'm not sure.

I myself had a DS-X, which worked pretty well until it broke. So I'm thinking about getting an R4. I'll be able to pass judgment once I get one.

[Haldrie]

Well mine was a little more then $44 mostly because I got a packaged deal that came with a Kingston microSD card and the R4 comes with a USB microSD reader, as mentioned above, so all you need is a USB drive and you're set. It just so happens that my laptop also has a memory stick reader that only works for SD memory sticks so I have 2 ways of using the microSD card I have.

It is true that I did leave out some things from the first post such as the Action Replay support which contains the same database of codes as the actual Action Replay DS which I also own. The R4's software was last updated in May of this year so any R4 purchased now should some with the latest software. I also did forget to mention about the saves being saved directly to the memory stick but I figured it would be easy enought to figure out and not to mention I'd alread read about the feature long before considering the purchase the R4 so it sort of slipped my mind to mention it.

Oh and for those of you wondering, I got my R4 from http://www.dealextreme.com/. The package had free shipping and came straight from Hong Kong. The url for the actual package I purchased is http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.1459.

Looking more closely at the Moonshell plugins shows support for more media formats then I originally stated including aac, bmp, gif, mp2, ogg and wav among others. It also looks like png and Photoshop psd images are also supported.

Also I have found a nice homebrew app that allows you to use the DS' Wi-Fi feature to transmit your original DS cart saves to your computer. It's called savsender and can be found at the following address along with a link to a tutorial on how to use it.
http://frodo.dyn.gno.org/~brettk/savsender

The saves will need to be patched with a special program included on the CD that comes with the R4 in order for them to work on it. I have managed to back-up all of my NDS game saves and am having fun tricking Nintendo WFC into thinking that my rom of Mario Kart DS on my R4 is the same as my real cart of it. Thanks to this program and my new R4 I no longer need my original NDS games since I now have the saves from my original games on my R4 along with the rom of each game.

With all of this capability the R4 will pay for itself in no time as it has already paid for itself in only a few short days for me by not only replacing the need for me to use my original DS games as well as cutting out any need for me to ever purchase a DS game again as long as there is a rom dump of it but it has now become my new MP3 player virtually replacing my CD/MP3 player.

Ok, I think that about covers it for this update.

[Kazekage Gaara]

Yeah I got the same exact thing. R4 English Version along with an orignial Japanese 1 GB Kingston MicroSD for around Rs. 2000 (Indian Rupees) $47 (US). I haven't bought mine from that site. I just saw it in one of the gray markets over here in Mumbai, India and grabbed it Just couldn't resist the offer coz the price was just about perfect , reason enough for postponing my PSP for about two months and getting the NDS Lite first

[Jackhammer]

I've only had my new R4DS flash card for a couple of days now and already I've been able to do so much that I never imagined I would be able to when I first ordered it a little over a week ago. The R4DS is truely a wonderful piece of hardware and a must have for any DS owner no matter what you intend to do with it.

What you can do with the R4DS (what I've learned):

• Run homebrew roms on your DS without needing to use a passme to load it from a GBA flash card (patching required)
• Run commercial game roms without a passme
• Boot software in the GBA slot straight from the R4 menu with skinable border (can also be used as a passme to boot NDS software from the GBA cart, not tested since I don't have a GBA flash cart)
• Play MP3s (128kb/s with no ID3 tag information)
• Play DPG videos
• View JPEG images
• View TXT documents
• View eBooks (not tested yet only read about in R4 manual)

The R4 comes with the MoonShell OS which allows you to view and play media and the R4 and the MoonShell OS are both fully skinable and can be customized to suit your needs. All the software you need is included on a mini CD that comes with the R4. Just copy the files from the system folder on the disc to you microSD/transFlash card and the software is installed. Roms and other files can be stored anywhere on the memory stick except the system folders as those are hidden from view in the R4's menu.

The MP3 playback feature allows you to listen that any MP3 as long as it is 128kb/s and does not contain any ID3 tag information. If ID3 tag information is present on the MP3 file when it is loaded on the memory stick then the MP3 will not play correctly (personal experience and a lot of trial and error taught me this). The MoonShell OS will even continue to play the music even after you close the DS's screen and put it in sleep mode allowing you to use your DS as a portable MP3 player. Plug in your headphones, stick your DS in your pocket and jam .

Running homebrew roms for the DS requires you to patch them with the appropriate DLDI patch.

As for running commercial roms all you do is copy the uncompressed rom the your memory stick and load it into the R4. The R4 fully supports all features incluing Wi-Fi, microphone support and sleep mode support. I already tried a copy of Mario Kart DS on it and the Nintendo WFC servers couldn't tell the difference between my real copy and the rom on the R4.

The R4 also contains an in-game reset feature that can be turned on and off at will by pressing the R button or tapping on the R icon on the top-right on the touch screen before loading a rom. When turned on you can press L+R+A+B+X+Y to reset the R4 to the main menu no matter where you are in your game. This is a nice way to quickly switch roms without having to turn off your DS and turn it back on again.

I have managed to fit a total of 15 roms and about 25 MP3s on a 1GB microSD and still have space left over. Oh and for those of you who don't have a momory stick reader on your computer, the R4 comes with a USB microSD reader that lets you access you microSD memory stick through your USB drive so noone is left out.

So far every commercial game I've loaded on the R4 has run flawlessly including the Castlevania games and the new Pokemon Diamond and Pearl.

Feel free to ask me any questions and I will be glad to answer to the best of my knowledge.

Excellent review. +rep.


I have bought one from ebay on the strength of this thread. I'll have to wait a few days before it arrives...

[StormShadow]

I bought my R4 off of DealExtreme.com and it's probably the best $45 I've ever spent. My only minor gripe about it would be how you have to convert video files to .DPG format since the R4 software doesn't support .wmv or .mov files (yet). Then again, I didn't buy the dang cartridge to play movies/videos on it but I bought it to play the games! $30 for one new DS game vs. $45 for one cart that can play 1100+ games? That's a no-brainer right there...

[Haldrie]

You can get a program to convert videos to DPG format here:
http://forums.maxconsole.net/showthread.php?t=18663

There is also a tutorial on how to use it. The default language for this program is Japanese so you'll have to change it to English (or your native language) when you first start the program in order for you to know what you're doing.

[Jackhammer]

My R4 arrived on Saturday...It was a good buy, so far it has run everything I have tried. No need to patch the roms, just drag and drop...

[kupo]

While the R4 is great at playing roms, it, and any other DS flashcart is kind of crap (seriously, compare with a PSP) when it comes to displaying video. Of course, this is because of the DS' hardware and resolution, but I just had to throw it in here..

[Haldrie]

Well the DS was never made for multimedia of this kind in the first place so all these features allowing these flash cards to play this media is just a bunch of work arounds that have been discovered for it. The DS was intended for games while the PSP (in my opinion) is just an overpriced media player when you can easily get a protable DVD player that can do all the PSP can and more minus the ability to play games which it seems people hardly ever use the PSP for that anyway. The PSP to most people that own one is just another portable media player while the DS has always been about the games and the people that play them. This of course goes for all Nintendo systems.

[Vagabond]

Thanks for the amazing info. + rep

EDIT: Shit, I got to spread some around first.

[kupo]

Well the DS was never made for multimedia of this kind in the first place so all these features allowing these flash cards to play this media is just a bunch of work arounds that have been discovered for it. The DS was intended for games while the PSP (in my opinion) is just an overpriced media player when you can easily get a protable DVD player that can do all the PSP can and more minus the ability to play games which it seems people hardly ever use the PSP for that anyway. The PSP to most people that own one is just another portable media player while the DS has always been about the games and the people that play them. This of course goes for all Nintendo systems.

Yes. I never said anything against this. I agree, I agree.

[Haldrie]

Well after all the good things about the R4 that I've mentioned it's time to tell you about the only bad things I've found with it.

Download and Play Issues

It seems that although the R4 has no problem going online and running games it does have issues with other DS' detecting a problem when connecting via the Download and Play feature. I have tried using my original model DS with the R4 and hosting a game while having someone with a DS Lite connect via Download and Play. My game is detected on their DS and they are able to perform the download but once the download is complete the connection is broken. My DS kept trying to send the data while the other DS got stuck at the Nintendo logo that shows once a DS Download and Play game starts up after being downloaded. I also tried this the other way around with the same results. It has taken me this long to notice this because I haven't had any access to another DS until now. It is possible that they might correct this issue in future firmware updates.

Faulty spring in microSD slot

It seems that the spring used in the microSD slot on the R4 was not made very well. Although a nice feature it does not seem to stand up to extensive use as I am now having trouble triggering the lock to hold my microSD card into the slot and at one point it even spung out while I was loading the R4 after I finally got it in. This is a known and common issue among R4 owners and no doubt among M3 Simply users as well since the hardware for both is basically the same aside from a small souder on the curcuit board that turns the R4 into an M3 Simply and vis versa when the connection is broken or missing (there is no souder on the contacts in the actual R4 but the contacts are still there). The only solution I've found to get the spring lock to work for me now is to open the R4 and fiddle with the wire that holds the lock in place. It's this wire that is the problem since it is very flimsy and can easily be pushed either way along the locking path preventing it from following the correct path to lock and unlock the microSD. It is actually a similar feature found in the original NES to lock and unlock the cartriage from the slot only in a smally package. If all else fails I have found that tapping the microSD down proves to be very effective. At least it's better then having to buy a brand new R4.

To all of you that have ordered the R4 because of this topic please do not let this news get you down as it is still the best investment you will ever make for your DS.