Be Excellent To Each Other

Excellent people!

I am currently in the process of purchasing an R4 card for the DS, which I'd like to stick a Megadrive emulator on, plus a few ROMS, to give to a female friend as a gift. She's not that technically clued up, so could someone point me in the direction of a compatible emulator that works well and is relatively simple to use?

I'm getting myself one of these cards too, so if anyone could point me in the direction of a repository of decent DS homebrew, I'd be very grateful, and if anyone has any specific recommendations of things I should acquire, please let me know.

I've been homebrewing on the PSP for ages, but this is my first foray into it on the DS, so I'm a touch on the clueless side at present.

Thanks as always!

Is it too late to tell you to buy a different card instead of the R4?

No idea about a Megadrive emulator I'm afraid but if you want I can point you in the direction of a decent Spectrum one and a tape file of Afterburner?

It is too late in the sense that I've already bought the bloody thing, yes, but it wasn't all that expensive so if there's a valid reason why a different one would be better then I'm all ears. Well, obviously I'm not or I wouldn't be able to type this, but you get the point.

I thought the R4 was meant to be the proverbial bees knees of DS cards. Did I thunk wrong?

That was the case about 6 months or so ago. It's still a very capable card and will be absolutely fine for homebrew and most games but ever since one game was released that could detect it was being run on certain flash carts (and would end the game at a particular point) I've been a little distrustful of them. If you're not planning on updating it with new games then the R4 will be fine as I believe every current game works with it; it's just future games that I would be worried about.

(For the record, I would've recommended an AceKard 2, which had no such problem with the game -- it was a Final Fantasy one IIRC)

The problem with the R4 right now is that it's no longer being made or supported by the original development team.

A couple of the the original R4 team members have produced a new version that can be bought dirt-cheap in the UK and works fine with all/most releases so far.

Thing is, I get the impression it won't receive any further updates, so several/many future releases are likely to not work on it (correct me if I'm wrong !).

I sold mine a few weeks ago and got an Edge card, which seems to be rather wonderful so far...

Mega Drive on DS is iffy compatibility-wise, although some games run nicely. Go to http://nintendo-ds.dcemu.co.uk/ and download jEnesisDS (via the sidebar). Shame your friend isn't a big Speccy, GB mono or Neo-Geo fan, since emulators for those platforms run almost flawlessly on the DS.

Play my game.

Blast Arena Advance DS, please.

Thank you once again, Peoples Of Excellence! I'll give jEnesisDS a go - if it can run Aladdin and a few of the Sonics, my good lady friend will be pleased! And if not, I'm sure I can find other shite to bung on it.

I will definitely have to give your game a go now MrD.

I should also point out ApprenticeMinusDS, from the same guy who did jEnesisDS. Very playable Master System/Game Gear emulator with more accurate sound than DSMasterPlus (although it hasn't got round to emulating YM2413 FM yet). And since MS and DS use the same screen resolution size, AMDS can display the MS's screen in pixel-perfect form without having to do some pixel-squeezing methods like SMSAdvance.

That's a fine name for a CPC emulator if ever I heard one. Better than "CrocoDS", anyway.

In other DS news, I don't know if this is some kind of weird parallel universe shit going on but Square-Enix has just released a Pingu game in Japan:



This means we can directly link Squenix with Frank Sidebottom, which pleases me greatly.

NOOOK NOOOK.


Gah! People keep asking for this.

What specifically would you want it to do?

Same thing but prettier, maybe with an analogue control system in the bottom screen, maybe with a huge time display there.

don't think genesis games run well at all, did have some fun played snes games, but in practice gameboy mono/speccy is where it is at (haven'ttried neo geo becuase of the filesizes)

I realise its probably rubbish but Argos are selling this :

http://www.argos.co.uk/static/Product/p ... 900963.htm

At half price (so £14.99)

Not the greatest 20 games included and i bet the emulation is a bit off but i'm considering one for keeping in the glovebox of the car when i have to wait around for someone or i'm stuck somewhere without my DS

edit : theres a review with picies here : http://www.rllmukforum.com/index.php?showtopic=191437

So, what's the current pick of DS flash-card thingies right now? Someone has asked me and I'm so out of touch (I'm still using my M3DS Simply, although quite infrequently).