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I'm very supprised no one has mentioned the m3simply yet. I got mine a few weeks back and it's been awesome. It plays clean NDS roms (unmodified exact copies), runs homebrew, and plays music and movies (needs transcoding) right out of the box. It takes microSD cards and comes with a microSD-usb reader/writer. You can find the microSD chips and the m3simply's online for about the price of two NDS games - not bad. You can then download all 872 games (and counting). The best part is you can play all the wifi games over the internet and locally. You can also check out the compatibility list and this comparison chart.

Happy homebrewing :)

I owned a PSP (for Lumines)

Other people don't have to. The luminous game is now on GBA.

So I sold my PSP. The DS I'll never sell.

Did you try buying a GBA flash card with the money that you got, so that you can play GBA homebrew?

Sorry but im not spending $50 on Lumines

Especially because if you buy a GBA and a GBA Movie Player or a GBA flash card, you can get Luminesweeper free.

Why are the movies priced higher then DVDs??

Because the UMD-ROM and UMD Video patents are newer, for one thing.

Never mind that there aren't any "system seller" games for [Sony's PSP handheld video game system] yet.

Are you taking into account Lumines? Or are you also taking into account a clone on a GBA flash card?

I'm just dreaming but my idea of a revolution would have the capacity to program GBA carts with games I download.

Here's your revolution, and here are the free games.

The #1 complaint I hear from DS FANS is that it has no games. The PSP on the other hand has a huge library, enough for any tastes.

The Nintendo DS has every Nintendo DS game and every GBA SP title except the heavily multiplayer Four Swords and Pokemon games, which are both being ported to run natively on the DS. With an EFA-Linker memory card (80 USD), it also has most NES games (in PocketNES), many GB mono games (in Goomba), many PC Engine/TurboGrafx-16 games (in PCE Advance), and even a few Super NES games without sound (in SNES Advance).

Besides, in some markets where the Nintendo DS has established itself, there is no PSP. Sony had to divert all the European PSP inventory to North America when dead pixels proved to be more of a problem than Sony had anticipated.

The Nintendo DS plays many original Game Boy games just fine through Goomba and a GBA memory card. It's the GBC-only games that need a new DS-native emulator.

Uh... Ploy? You do realize that the PSP is portable right?

So is a portable DVD player, which anybody near a Wal-Mart store can pick up for $160, which is close to the price of the Nintendo DS without a memory card.

The only thing the DS has that got me to buy it was it's backwards compatibility with GBA games.

Not only that, but with the EFA-Linker (under $100 incl. shipping), you can play a boatload of NES games and many Game Boy games as well. So now the Nintendo DS is compatible with GBA games and unofficially compatible with many NES and GB games, but Sony couldn't be bothered to include a PS1 emulator with the PSP and uses code signing to prevent the free software community from stepping up.

This device connects to the GBA cart slot, not the DS cart slot, and the DS sees it as a GBA game and doesn't let it use the extra DS features. As for the GBA, homebrew developers such as myself already have Extreme Flash Advance.

especially as I myself, despite knowing how to program, have never programmed for a game console before.

Programming on the Game Boy Advance feels like programming on a PC running DOS. You ought to try it sometime.

I could've made a really nice old-style LCD game in Macromedia Flash that would not only have a nice visual touch as it took advantage of vector graphics (no pixels), but it could've run just fine on any Windows, Linux, Macintosh system without a problem.

What handheld devices run SWF? A $190 GBA plus a flash card will run GBA and NES homebrew games.

Anyway, one major point of PDROMS contests and other homebrew development efforts is to prove to console makers that there exist legitimate uses of, say, GBA flash cards other than for playing unlawful copies of proprietary video games. For example, if you have a flash card and my GSM Player, you can turn your GBA into a pocket music player.