Episode: 38
Title: HPR0038: R4DS Review
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0038/hpr0038.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 10:38:16

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1
Hello everybody, I am Stankdog and this is Hacker Public Radio.
On today's episode we're going to do a little bit of a hardware review of a device that
I purchased recently. It's something called the R4DS. It is a pass-through device or an adapter for the Nintendo Game Boy DS.
And I thought I'd do a little mini review, talk about some of the pros and cons of it on the show tonight.
So, first of all, let's talk about what the whole point of this thing is. If anybody doesn't know listening to the show what a Nintendo DS is,
it is a handheld gaming device made by, obviously, Nintendo. It's got two screens on it, a touch screen at the bottom and a second screen at the top.
It was made to be backwards compatible with Game Boy Advance games, which is kind of handy.
And, of course, new Nintendo DS games, which you probably see in just about every story you walk into.
Well, I happen to travel a lot for my job, so I purchased one of these a couple years ago and it's been pretty cool.
But I always kind of thought it might be neat to have other applications on there, kind of wonder what kind of power was behind it.
I know that immediately when it was released, some people began trying to port Linux over to it.
And, there became, there popped up, I should say, a community of Nintendo DS homebrew programmers, homebrew meaning people who are actually writing applications for the Nintendo DS environment.
So, I thought that was kind of cool. People are making not only their own games, but other applications like personal information managers, media players, software of view, images on your Nintendo DS, etc. etc.
These are all things that, you know, they're neat. It's kind of a nice little trick and everything, but to be quite frank, the early versions, the early ways to get this to work on your Nintendo DS, like a lot of other console hacking, involved taking your machines apart, maybe not necessarily for the DS, but for the Xbox and others.
You always end up having to take it apart, go soldering a bunch of things. So, the early generations were rough and required a lot of steps to actually get into the meat and potatoes of the machine.
Well, that's not the case anymore, and that's why I finally broke down and got into the homebrew community, if you will.
There's been a few devices lately, and the one I mentioned earlier that I purchased the R4DS is one of those devices. It's what they call a slot one flash kit.
And slot one would be the slot in the back of the Nintendo DS, where Nintendo DS cards are just slide in. They're very small. Anybody that has one knows that they're just a little bit bigger than an SD card. They're not a standard SD or compact flash or anything like that. They're proprietary form, proprietary shape.
And an SD card in and of itself will not fit in there cleanly. Nintendo DS games, those are games designed specifically for this console, go in the back and slot one, Game Boy Advance games, as I mentioned the backwards compatibility earlier, go in the front, which is called slot two.
And I'm talking about the latest hardware, maybe earlier versions had those reversed, but they're still called and referred to slot one and slot two.
So this new generation of devices, the R4DS specifically, is a very, very straightforward and easy way to run homebrew applications on your Nintendo DS as a slot one pass through the device.
Basically what you get when you order this kit, and I ordered mine from a place called Deal Extreme, which is really just the middle man it ends up getting shipped from Hong Kong.
So got it a couple of weeks after I ordered it from Hong Kong. It's been pretty high demand right now actually for I believe it was somewhere around, somewhere around $40.
You can probably find for less than 50 bucks, maybe a lot less if you shop around, but I think I've paid about 40 bucks for it.
And what you get when you order it is a box that contains a couple things.
First of all, it contains the slot one device itself.
Basically this looks like any Nintendo DS game you would buy off the shelf.
And it is, again that thing I described earlier looks kind of like an SD card.
It is a card. Now there's nothing on the card. There's no games on the card. It is basically exactly what it sounds like a pass through device.
This device slides into there, but the part that makes it really useful is the fact that as a pass through device what it does is it allows you to put this card inside your Nintendo DS, but it's got a small opening in the back.
And in the back of the device itself, you can slide in a micro SD card.
So the micro SD card is readable by most computer systems or a lot of other systems.
We all know that that is definitely a standard. And that leads to the second thing that comes with the kit when you buy.
Of course this is not a very depending on where you purchase it, but the second thing is that it does come with a micro SD card.
DS SD can get confusing micro SD card. I went ahead in order to 2GB and I got to say it filled up a lot faster than I thought it would to be honest with you.
Obviously you can buy as large as you think you might need and you will need a way to get data onto that through your computer.
If your computer already has a slot for the micro SD card or if you have an adapter for a micro SD to a full size SD card, which most of them come with that, you can in a card reader on your computer, you can interface it that way.
Or with the kit that I purchased, I actually got a USB adapter so I could plug the USB into the computer and the micro SD card in the other side of that so I could write directly to it as a mini flash drive.
So already that seems like a pretty good deal to me, 2GB drive, 2GB micro SD card, excuse me, with the adapter. That alone to me is worth probably $30 to $40. That's pretty handy to have.
But it also comes with a CD and a little bit of a manual. You might as well throw the manual to the side because it's very bad English.
It's kind of hard to read and understand so I found that was pretty much useless. The CD that it comes with is also equally confusing.
But what I did and what anybody probably listening, this probably does when they buy any new hardware is go to the website first of all and see if there's an updated version of that anyway.
By the time they package and burn those CDs and ship those out, they probably made updates to this software anyway.
So I went to the website, downloaded the latest version, threw that onto the card.
And basically what it is is there's a certain directory structure that have a certain naming convention where it puts on what we're going to refer to as a bootloader.
And since they figured out how to make this happen through slot one, all you have to do is load the bootloader with the proper naming conventions, everything on to your micro SD card.
Slide it into the adapter and that whole combination into your Nintendo DS and boot.
And what it'll do is it will kind of bypass the Nintendo DS is built in a boot system and load directly from the card and present you with a menu.
And the menu is also very equally simple. It does support the touch screen and everything's working and acknowledges the hardware and everything.
And it has three options, one called gains, one for home brew applications and one that actually brings up kind of a miniature shell.
Basically they're pretty self explanatory, the first one gains since you have this device in the slot, you obviously can't have another game in there at the same time.
And I'm going to just put a disclaimer out here, I do not know the legalities of this, so we're going to speak hypothetically at this point.
You can find, when this is just a fact, you can find ROMs of lots of Nintendo DS, Game Boy and pretty much any other console game outside of this conversation.
But you can find ROMs for just about any Nintendo DS game out there on the interwebs, somewhere out there in the tubes.
So you can find the games that you own, for example, I own seven or eight games for the Nintendo DS.
And I don't like carrying them around with me everywhere that I go. So it's kind of handy to have the ability to put all those ROMs onto one SD card, of course that I legally own hypothetically.
And pop those in and have all the games in my disposal without having to swap cards in and out all the time.
So that's another cool thing that's happened in the later versions here. Some of the very early versions of these would allow you to do similar functionality, but you had no way really to save the games.
So that's one, first of all, one thing to point out about this device, as we begin more of a review here, is that it will allow you to save games that create your save games in the directory where the game is and it puts you as a .sad file, a save file.
So the cool thing about that is you can have all the games that you want on the device and the game ROMs usually end in a .nDS, obviously from Nintendo DS extension, but it will put the save game files on there.
And it gives you the neat option if you wanted to back those up to your hard drive or to a CD or whatever else if you're with one of those people that does like to save your save games.
And if it's a game that takes a long time to play, you don't want to risk ever losing it or, you know, the other, if you did actually have the original ROM and you lost it, your save game is stored on that little ROM cards.
So if you were to lose your game, you've lost your save game, you'd have to start back over after you bought the new game. Well, by allowing this, you can have those save games and back them up and reload them as you see fit. So that's one neat thing.
Again, it's through a menu system. It'll allow you to choose whichever game it is you want to play and simply hit the button and it will load that game up as though you had booted directly from the ROM.
So you don't have to do a lot of weird things. You don't have to jump through who if you don't have to solder anything.
So this is the latest generation of devices. So if you ever have, ever have hesitated about purchasing such a thing, they are now as easy as I think they're ever really going to get.
What else is it does have some other features on there that don't really do anything for me, but some listeners might like to know that it has some sort of, I think it's action replay or something I believe the name of it was.
Honestly, I bypassed that because it wasn't interesting, but apparently that's some sort of system that allows you to cheat, put in cheat codes, pre-program in cheat codes.
So that every time you start the game, it'll automatically give you full help or something like that, different things.
So it does have support for that built into it, which is kind of neat if you're into that more than I have apparently.
And let's see, other homebrew games. There are lots of perfectly legal. Well, again, I'm not a lawyer, so I believe it's perfectly legal to put your own games on there.
It is open source. The community does release all the stuff open source. They don't like it charge people charging court. There's actually been some manufacturers from China that have been releasing devices and bundling a bunch of homebrew software on it and charging money.
And the homebrew community was not very happy with that. And they actually don't take very kindly to people who do that.
So that's not exactly the case with this one. This one just gives you the basic fundamentals you need.
There's a lot, it's a pretty surprisingly active community online about this. So you can go out and do a little bit of searching for Nintendo DS homebrew and Nintendo DS hackings, et cetera, et cetera, and find a lot of other things that you can do and a lot of homebrew applications and games that you can download.
The other thing, it does, it's worth pointing out that they've come so far now that there's no concern. There's nothing that I have found that this doesn't recognize as far as the hardware that includes the rumble pack.
I don't have one myself. I know the kids like a lot of the rumble pack that when you're fighting, you get shot. It actually shakes and vibrates in your hand. It does support that and acknowledge that memory pack. Any any of the plugins and stuff that has support for all of that.
It's pretty much complete product these days and you can actually change and I'm tinkering around with this pretty much as we speak. You can change the background and basically it's skinnable.
You can skin this thing if you do a little bit of reading online. It's just creating your graphics in the right format and file names because it's very particular about that.
And the right resolution and all that, you can actually make your own custom graphics and put on there. So you can fool your friends into thinking that you hacked it yourself and you didn't just download or didn't just buy something for $40 and change the colors on it.
You actually can probably fool most of your friends and make them think that you hacked your Nintendo DS and your own you own your puverly and all that kind of good stuff.
I think that's about it. I mentioned there's a shell which gives you some access. There is a Linux DS Linux. I think I should say, which is pretty handy. If you buy the kit, again, mine came from deal extreme.com. You could probably find them at a lot of other places. I'm not endorsing them necessarily but came fine. I got it in a reasonable amount of time. It was in good shape.
Came with three things like I said, the adapter itself, a micro SD card, two gigs in my case, and a USB adapter for the micro SD card, which you may or may not need if you have the card reader and an adapter already.
So that's pretty much it. If anybody has ever been hesitant about modding their Nintendo DS, you shouldn't have to worry about that anymore. It's gotten to the point where it's pretty much plug and play and even though the manual and the instructions and the website are all very bad English and not the most complete sentences or anything like that in the world.
It's pretty simple and self-explanatory and within about 10 or 15 minutes I had the whole thing together, loaded, running, and everything worked pretty fine. So you can pretty much figure it out. You guys are all smart people out there listening to the show. So thank you for listening to this episode of Hacker Public Radio and we will see you again tomorrow.
Thank you for listening to Hacker Public Radio. HPR is sponsored by Carro.net so head on over to C-A-R-O dot-N-T for all of us here.
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