Tom Doyle :: TALK

I recently purchased a Nintendo DS Lite for my wife, who became hooked on the Brain Training game while playing one at a friends.

A friend of mine then put me wise to a “backup” tool called R4DS or Revolution for DS. 

It’s a small cartridge, exactly like a normal game cartridge which has a SD Card slot, in which you can download games from the Internet and load them on to it. In fact, depending on what size SD Card you get, you could in theory put thousands of games on this one cartridge.

So off I went on my merry way to find out about these little thingys. It wasn’t long before I found plenty of information on the Internet about the R4DS, but I also found out about another, more expensive one called the M3 DS Simply. Anyway, after much research, it turned out that the more expensive one, the M3 DS Simply, didn’t offer much more than the R4DS. So my next goal was to find the cheapest place to buy it.

So my searches lead me to www.consolesource.com - a website that seems to be dedicated to tools like this (in some fashion) for all consoles! I purchased the R4DS with the 2 gig SD Card - it cost me just $95 when delivery charge was included. It arrived within 3 days!!!

The R4DS came in a small box which includes the cartrdige, a USB SD Card Reader and a CD with the software required. When you receive it first, you need to put the little what can only be described as, operating system onto the SD card (this is included on the CD). You then need to get your Nintendo DS ROMs and put them on the SD Card too.

When you turn on the Nintendo DS, it boots up into the R4DS operation system. You have 3 options, one is to load games from your card, the second is to play media file such as MP3’s or video files (they must be converted) and the third; I’ve yet to figure out! To play a game, you simply select from your downloaded roms.

Since it’s possible to download 1,000’s of pirated ROMs from sites like www.1rom.net, it means you’d never have to buy a game again, if you were tha way inclined…. quite a worrying thought for Nintendo.