Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
### Why would I buy this when I can get a Supercard?
This is a thing you buy when you *can't* get a Supercard. You know, not everybody has a credit card, feels good about buying things in some shop in HongKong or has a specialized video game store that actually sells Supercard near his home. Actually getting a Supercard or a similar device is by far the hardest part when one wants to get started with homebrew stuff. This card from Datel on the other side actually has a change to end up in a shop near your, so you can just walk in and buy one, that way it might end up in the hands of people that didn't even know about homebrew before buying it, which a Supercard never would.
Did the homebrew writers get a fair deal when Datel took their work and sold it at a profit?
With increased delivery of games via the internet, I think we're going to see increased efforts to view game devices the same way the telecom industry views cellular phones. That is, they own the hardware and we just lease it from them. Just as we're not now able to buy any device we want and use our cellular service in any way we want, the game industry would love to prevent us from using products like Supercards or the one in this article.
It's one of the reasons I won't use services like Steam. The iTunes/URGE model, which so many of us have come to loathe is just around the corner for the game industry.
As always, though, I've got my money on the hacker-innovators of the world to do to these efforts what they are successfully doing to the rest of the IP gangsters.
I heard an interesting interview on NPR today with a vice-president from some telecom anti-regulatory outfit. Everytime the interviewer (Brooke Gladstone from "On the Media") asked him why we can't get call-timers or non-crippled Bluetooth on our cellular phones, he just kept chanting "Free Market, Free Market, Free Market". He referred to the telecom industry as one of the most competitive of all. I wish people would learn that there is a very dark side to this worship of the "Free Market" and that regulation is often a very very good thing.
I salute the subversive efforts of the people who sell and use the Supercard and the gizmo in TFA. They may not realize just how revolutionary they are or how necessary such efforts will be for consumers. A corner has turned a while ago, and industry can no longer be absolutely viewed as friendly.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.