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Mass Market DS Homebrew Cart Released
Croakyvoice writes "Datel has finally released the Games
n Music Homebrew cart for the Nintendo DS, this mass market entry level cart
features a 128mb Micro SD card and comes with a 25 game CD of the best of DS homebrew
games." Games 'n' Music contains everything you need straight out
of the box. It even comes bundled with a 25-game CD, offering some of the best
games the DS home brew scene has to offer, as well as a video conversion program."
I bet Datel didn't make those 25 games themselves. I bet the video converter is just BatchDPG. Why would I buy this when I can get a Supercard?
Well, here's hoping Slashdot doesn't take down DCEmu today...
I think it's a good start, though I can't say I like all of the Slot 1 solutions yet. They still don't have a way to play games that need GBA mode, which is a bit of a deal breaker for me. The only way to play GB/GBC games on the DS is through a Slot 2 adapter with the Goomba emulator on it. (It's much easier to do that than to carry around my GBA SP with a ton of cartridges.
I myself have an M3 Adapter with a Passcard 3, which does the same thing that this does except it requires both a Slot 1 and Slot 2 cartridge. It takes standard SD cards but sticks out of my DS Lite a lot, though I'm probably going to get myself an M3 Lite soon which will require Micro SD, just like the one in the story does.
I will say, though, that this is a great way to show people what the DS is capable of doing. I use DS AIM fairly frequently, and DS2Key is great for war driving. MSN users will like BeUP, and there's all sorts of other applications for it, such as text writers, calculators (TI-85 emulator), and so on. Moonshell is an excellent audio player. That's not even mentioning all of the wonderful homebrew games, most of which I haven't played with much. Among my favorite are DSudoku, a clone of Text Twist, A Touch of War, and there's a Civ-like game whose name slips my mind at the moment. All are completely free and run well.
I hope that this particular release further encourages the DS homebrew community.
But does it come with a 25 game CD of the best DS homebrew games?
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
Did anyone mention that this comes with a 25 game CD yet?
Just a little advice... there's a DS flash cart called the DS-Xtreme. I bought one, and it worked great for about a month or two. After that it started freezing up randomly. I left a message on their support site, and after about two and a half weeks they replied with a new firmware update to try. Loading it completely hosed the unit. 9 times out of 10 the DS doesn't recognize the card at all. On the rare occasions that it does recognize the card, attempting to use it freezes the DS instantly.
The problems look to be rather common. It seems like the manufacturing plant slightly tweaks each batch, causing unexpected problems each time.
The DS-X is also $125 for a 512 MB cart. This Datel product is $40, so it's looking pretty good to me right now.
Did the homebrew writers get a fair deal when Datel took their work and sold it at a profit?
http://www.devkitpro.org/
I don't know, google around a little =P
Datel released this months ago. I have seen it in my local Best Buy for a couple months at least. No, I am not confusing it with their Action Replay or Max Media products. In fact, this very product was recalled because one of the homebrew titles could show something "inappropriate" (probably pornography). Information about the recall:
http://www.maxconsole.net/?mode=news&newsid=14541
If this is truly a mass market device, I wonder how Datel has out-maneuvered the DMCA, since this thing has to have a Pass-Me or equivalent mechanism for bypassing the DS' RSA code...
"I might have made a tactical error in not going to a physician for 20 years." -- Warren Zevon
First off, the DMCA applies to circumvention devices for encrypted content. Last I checked, this thing wasn't a decryption device.
Second, this thing doesn't "bypass" the DS startup handshake. It implements it (it was cracked some time ago, as I understand it).
Some people are asking whether the homebrew games were made by Datel and if not, how were the authors compensated...well, I'm one of the authors of one of the games on that disc, Super Snake DS. Everyone got $180 worth of stinky Datel products...honestly...i'm starting to wish I never gave them permission to include my game, even if it is freely downloadble already.
Though, it's not like anyone gave them full rights to the games, there "contract" over e-mail basicly just allowed them to include the game and that's it, otherwise the original authors can do whatever they want. Though, then again, it's not like I can technically enter into a legally binding contract to begin with, so I guess the little e-mail I sent them means nothing further more.
Though, I'm sure the fact that I wrote a game for the Nintendo DS at the age of 17 that got onto a commerically aviable product that can be purchased at your local Best Buy will look good somewhere...so it's not all bad.
If anyone is wondering...I forgot the name of it, but there is a game that has random start-up pictures...one of the pictures showed some bare-breasts. ;-)
The MMD officially has no support for commercial roms. However, soon after its release, a patcher program was released by an "anonymous" source that lets a few games run off the device. Compatibility sucks though, so no one would knowingly buy the product for that purpose. Interestingly, this patcher program was later modified so that the GBA Movie Player, which is electrically similar, could also run a small selection of DS games.
However, this device is different. While the MMD is a slot-2 device that comes with a slot-1 launcher, this new product resides solely in slot-1 and has a built-in launcher. However, until a DLDI file is created for this new product, very little homebrew will work on it, meaning that its main capability will probably be just playing music, which most likely will use Moonshell anyway.
It is possible that the Music and Games card here is actually a rebranded R4 or M3 Simply, in which case the existing DLDI files would suffice. Anyone know if this is the case?
A friend and I bought one when they first came out in January. It's a nice device for watching video or listening to music. But the more I look at it, it's not the greatest for homebrew. There isn't a dldi driver available so you can't access the filesystem. This become a big program for homebrew software. DSLinux does run on it nicely as does a lot of homebrew software (assuming it doesnt need filesystem access). I just hope Datel would release a dldi driver or open up the specs a bit so someone can write one. Plus it's nice to be able to walk into a known store and buy something you can sorta do DS development on, instead of ordering online from Hong Kong from a grey area market.
I noticed after converting the d3v is really just a mpeg stream and nothing special. If you look in the install directory it has ffmpeg :)
I ran the converter under wine and you can see the ffmpeg arguments. So you can convert these easily under linux with native ffmpeg.
I am confused.I saw this at best buy a month ago and I heard they recalled it. Is this the rerelease?