News — Page 12
Here are two useful finds for original Nintendo hardware.
For Nintendo DS: DSPico flash cartridge with USB-C.
For Game Boy Advance SP: an IPS-ready eXtremeRate replacement shell.
NeoFlash
I wrote a new NeoFlash flashcart guide. I spent three days wrestling with it to figure everything out, and there are still options that don't work (or that I couldn't figure out).
NeoFlash is an amazing cartridge. It does its main job — running NDS and GBA games — perfectly. But the software for writing games to it was clearly made by people who had no idea what they were doing. That's the only way I can explain all the bizarre things that happen in NeoPower Kit. It crashes, throws errors, and a lot of its features simply don't work. For example, with GBA games you can enable an option to return from a game to the cartridge menu. Do that, and the games stop launching entirely. I wanted to exit games back to the menu, not make it impossible to launch them from the menu in the first place.
There is very little information about the cartridge. The developer took a rather creative approach to documentation: they saved a forum post written by an ordinary user as a web page and put it on the disc. And the instructions are basically “click Add to add a game to the program, click Burn to write it to the cartridge.” A true masterpiece of technical writing.
So, in this whole setup, the NeoFlash cartridge itself is the only thing that works properly. Everything else is awful.
Nintendo DS ML
A Nintendo DS ML console has appeared for sale on AliExpress.
It's a Nintendo DS Fat in a new, stylish shell.
P.S. And with a nice box too)
Update: this AliExpress listing is no longer available.
Compatibility
I wrote an article: Backward Compatibility, Region Locks, and System Language on Nintendo Handhelds.
Nintendo really did have some bizarre region restrictions, often with no obvious logic behind them %)
Those Little Thieves at IGM
The folks at IGM have posted a whole series of videos about handheld consoles.
For example, just today they released a video about the Nintendo DS family (and before that, one about the GBA).
They clearly spent a lot of time on my site and pulled plenty of information from it for a bunch of their videos :) Granted, there were some small mistakes in the articles that I only learned about later, but that's beside the point.
They even used clips from my videos for their segment about Game & Watch.
On the one hand, it's nice. On the other, they could at least have linked back to the site.
Little thieves :D
My Purchases
Recently I managed to pick up several rather unusual devices.
1. Barcode Battler — a tabletop game with barcode cards and a console-like device that calculates the outcome of battles.
I still haven't quite figured out how to play it. I bought it as material for a future video, because it was one of the first electronic devices to use ordinary cardboard cards as part of gameplay. Barcode Boy for the Game Boy came a little later, followed by the e-Reader for the Game Boy Advance in the early 2000s.
2. I also bought a Game Boy Advance SP clone — the !QU. I wanted to use it for photos, but the console turned out to be much more interesting than I expected.
Both GameBox and !QU Advance were sold by Russian companies Exeq and iQU Electronics, meaning they were released exclusively for our market. They had the same creator, Maxzhou88, who made the well-known K1 SP and Revo K101+ clones. Many people think !QU Advance is simply a K1 SP clone, but that's not quite true. Yes, GameBox is a clone with severely limited extra features. !QU Advance is much closer to the K1 SP, but still slightly worse — unfortunately, it can't be updated to the latest firmware.
3. My flashcart collection got a small addition too: I managed to buy an XG-Flash. I want to see whether it really is a clone of the first EZ-Flash and whether their readers are interchangeable. Incidentally, this may be one of the earliest versions, because they were only sold in this color at the very beginning.
4. I couldn't pass up the Action Replay Max either. This device can be used to hack both Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS cartridges. It plugs into the Nintendo DS's Game Boy Advance slot, and the device itself accepts both NDS and GBA cartridges. I'm not much of a cheat-code person, but I want to see how well it actually works.
5. A Road Rash cartridge for Game Boy arrived from the UK. The game itself isn't especially interesting to me, but people said this cartridge was unusual because it uses undocumented quirks of the Game Boy consoles' CPUs. That turned out to be true: despite being an original cartridge, it won't run properly on the GBC or GBA — technically it starts, then freezes.
6. A DSTT flashcart also arrived from the UK. I bought it for the collection and possibly as material for future articles and videos.
7. And the last two purchases: a Metroid Prime Hunters demo cartridge and an NDS Magic Key.
These cartridges are directly tied to the history of Nintendo DS hacking. The Metroid Prime Hunters demo came bundled with the very first version of the Nintendo DS, which launched first in North America. That made this cartridge central to the early hack, since every buyer had one.
NDS Magic Key, meanwhile, was the first PassMe variant that allowed commercial games to run on the Nintendo DS — in other words, it was used specifically for piracy. You can read more in the site's section: “The History of Flashcarts.”
GB Operator
Honestly, I thought GB Operator was dead. The software hadn't received an update in more than a year — it hadn't even reached version 1.0. But just a couple of days ago, a miracle happened. The folks at Epilogue released Playback 1.0.
GBA SMS2
Recently I got my hands on a very interesting device — GBA SMS2, also known as Memory Hunter.
It took me two full days to figure out how it works because the menu is in Chinese. But I got there in the end. Read the review/guide: “GBA SMS2 — Memory Hunter.” It's probably the most useful accessory for Game Boy Advance systems if you're into original cartridges.
Gateway 3DS
After a month, I finally managed to get the Gateway flashcart working on Nintendo 3DS. This whole adventure cost me 18,700 rubles. I had to buy three consoles — only to discover that I could have done everything on the first one and didn't need the other two at all.
Read the article on the site: “How I Tried to Get Gateway 3DS Working.”
P.S. I still need to write a proper guide for the cart, but first I need to figure out all of its quirks.
Purchases
I've bought myself a small pile of stuff.
1. Nintendo 3DS XL and a Gateway flashcart.
I knew Gateway doesn't work with firmware above 9.2, so I was looking for a console that had never been updated. And I found one. This gray Nintendo 3DS XL is running firmware 7.1.0-8E. But it still isn't suitable :(
The problem is that it's a 3DS Kiosk unit — the kind used in stores. It only works when plugged in, can't reboot normally, and has other limitations. Gateway refused to work with it. Even so, I'm still happy with the purchase because it's hardly an ordinary console.
Now I just have no idea where to find a 3DS running firmware below 9.2.
2. An original Super Mario Advance 4 cartridge.
I've had a big pile of Nintendo e-Reader cards intended specifically for this game for ages. The one thing I didn't have was the game itself.
3. A Pro Action Replay cartridge for Game Boy Advance.
It's a device for hacking games. But it's in Japanese, so figuring it out won't be easy.
4. The seller also threw in a cheat-code book for various consoles with the Pro Action Replay. It's in Japanese too, but at least it looks nice.
NoPass
A new article is up on the site: “NoPass.”
It covers the history of the device and how it works.
