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Nintendo DS's Compatibility With GBA FlashCards

Posted by Zonk on from the more-ds-touching dept.

zetasmack writes "I know that since the arrival of the Nintendo DS I (and i'm sure many other /.ers) have been anxiously awaiting some news on dev kits. Well, unfortunately no flash kits are available (to my knowledge) for the DS yet, but the folks at gameboy-advance.net have tested the DS's compatibility with all of the available GBA flash cards. From the article: "At this point there is NO NDS Flash Card or Linker made specificly for backup of Nintendo DS Roms so we have tested the compatibilty of Gameboy Advance Backup devices with the NDS. At this point we looked at the most simple and at the same time the most important things. Can you play Games from "GBA Flash Card name...", and Does the Card & Linker backup set works with Nintendo DS""

6 of 19 comments (clear)

  1. Summary: Most Work OK. by pkhuong · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Looking at the list quickly, we see that ~1/3 work flawlessly, while nearly as many need physical modifications.

    --
    Try Corewar @ www.koth.org - rec.games.corewar
  2. Great.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    Now I won't have to worry about backing up my legitimately purchased games. What a great product those flash cards are, if only they could be used for other purposes as well....

    1. Re:Great.... by zetasmack · · Score: 2, Informative

      they can be used for lots of other things. there are countless homebrew apps available, not to mention the amazing Pogoshell or all of the available emulators, picture viewers, ebook readers, etc.

  3. not very reliable by colle · · Score: 3, Interesting

    gameboy-advance.net is not the most reliable source of information about any Nintendo handheld console imo. They are the ones that by comparing cpu-frequencies declared it possible to emulate all snes-games on the GBA. Check out http://gbatemp.m4d.sm they have a quite good forum with lots of info about flashcarts and the DS.

    1. Re:not very reliable by Ayaress · · Score: 4, Informative

      I find their thing about the SNES emulation to be very iffy, though. Sure, many games should work just fine, you could emulate them with sound on a 486 after all, but there are some serious sticky points. There are a few SNES games that have never been playably emulated ever, even on high end PCs.

      The other big one is SDD-1 emulation. There are dozens of addon chips that need to be emulated, but the SDD-1 (Used by Street Fighter Alpha, Star Ocean, and so forth for graphics compression) has proven to be one of the most elusive, and takes a great deal of horsepower to emulate. A PC considerably more powerful than the GBA (or even DS), running Snes9x in real-mode DOS (without Windows running at all) still can't handle SDD-1. ZSNES can do it with the pre-decompressed graphics packs, but you'll get some serious slowdowns on low-end PCs (On a p2 266, I had bad slowdowns with Star Ocean if there were multiple characters and effects on screen at once).

      Anyway, aren't these also the same people who were talking about flawless PS1 emulation on the DS? Sorry, keep dreaming. Again, that's something that is still elusive even on the PC. Lots of games aren't working completely, and a great many require extensive settings tweaks to get running correctly.

      And need I remind you of the current state of NES emulation on the GBA? It's one thing to say that it can emulate the SNES and PSX and Genesis and Atari and your toaster, but it's another to even get it emulating the NES.

  4. GB Bridge by Dwedit · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Am I the only one who thinks it's idiotic to test the GB Bridge? The GB Bridge is not a flash cart, it converts a GBA cartridge into a GB/GBC cartridge. The Nintendo-DS's cartridge port is not shaped to accept GB/GBC games, which Nintendo themselves claim are not compatible.