The DS Lite & Me
March 22, 2007
The DS Lite is a DS, and it is tiny. And, you know something? I still don’t think it looks as good as the PSP when it’s opened up. When it’s closed it’s like a sleek little Apple-branded gadget - so it fits in with all my other Apple-branded gadgets - but when you open it it just looks a little silly. But, hey, when it’s open my eyes are on those screens, right? I mean, that’s what counts? To be fair, the screens are all kinds of awesome. Much better than what’s on the chunky old DS, which is what I’m used to playing.
It’s nice to own, and I’m glad I picked one up. I’ve had a chubby one lying around the house since they came out, so it’s not like I’m not familiar with the DS, but the Lite is a sweet little upgrade. If anything, it’s nice to remind myself of my massive oodles of cash that allows me afford to buy such a needless upgrade. It’s great being middle class.
You know what else is good? The R4 DS card. It’s a DS-like cartridge that you put a microSD card into and then it functions as some kind of whizzy rom loader/homebrew thing. Now, obvious piracy issues aside, there’s something to be said about the freedom of having all your games on one cartridge. It’s something I’ve got very used to with my (admittedly, hacked) PSP. These things are portable consoles, right? The last thing I need to do is fuss around over which one of my fifteen games I fancy playing at any one time. The luxury of just going into a menu and picking the game really is something nice. In the future, the developers should come up with some kind of way of doing this that isn’t such an ethical grey area.
I mean, imagine if Nintendo put 2gb of storage into the DS. Solder it onto the board or something, so people don’t have to worry about piracy issues. Then let the user copy games to it. Add in a feature where you can sync your save games between the flash memory and the carts themselves. Add in some kind of draconian DRM tool so people can’t let their friends copy their games. It would be incredible. Why aren’t Nintendo doing it right now? Because it would be impossible to implement without raising too many issues, that’s why. Still, it would really be convenient.
Anyway, I have a copy of Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin arriving, and I’m very much looking forward to that. Right now I’m playing through Elite Beat Agents and New Super Mario Bros, both of which I’m enjoying. If there’s one thing that impresses me about the current crop of handheld devices, it’s the strength of their titles. In my opinion, the GBA was flooded with too many SNES ports. The DS is something much better.
March 22, 2007 at 10:31 pm
I’ve been thinking of getting a DS flash cart, mainly because ScummVM has been ported to the DS and I can’t think of a better application for it than that.
Questions: where did you get the R4, how much did you pay, can you dump your own games to it, and does it work like a normal DS cart, meaning no passthrough dongles in the GBA port or whatever?
March 23, 2007 at 12:17 am
There’s a post up today about how to make the DS better. The author agrees with you on adding some flash RAM to the system.
link
March 23, 2007 at 12:22 am
I got it from here based on a recommendation from an rllmuk thread. People were worried that the site was fishy, but they sent my order off pretty sharpish and it arrived. Gameyeeeah is also good for stuff like this, but a bit more expensive.
After you put a microSD card into it (I got a 2gb one from play for £1
it goes into the DS slot and basically lives there. It boots all by itself, which is pretty clever and means you don’t need anything in the GBA slot. I think that’s a pretty new development, though, and it means a lot of homebrew is catching up and the slot1 cards don’t all support it yet.
You can’t dump your own games, either, so i’m giving up a lot of save games and high scores. I’m okay with that, because all of the really long games (Mario & Luigi, Castlevania etc) i’ve already completed and won’t play again. The stuff like Tetris I can just keep playing, so i’m happy.
March 23, 2007 at 2:46 pm
Cool. I’m thinking of getting one, but I read a review saying that an older version of ScummVM doesn’t work on the R4. Scumm has been updated since then though, so is there any chance you could stick the DS version on there and see if it works?
March 23, 2007 at 10:20 pm
Cha, it works. I’d get you some proof but I can’t find my camera.