Which companion card for my R4?

[Mortext]

Im trying to decide which slot2 cart i want to go along with my R4. When shopping about i was looking for compability (with the R4) storage space (on the slot2) and speed as my deciding factors.
These were the 3 carts that i came up with and i will probablly buy one of them.

Cyclods mini SD
EZ Flash 3 in 1
M3 Lite

I only need this cart to play gba games as ive other consoles to emulate various other systems with and the R4 covers the .nds's fine. I like the R4 but selling it to go with an option that plays both nds and gba is fine with me.

So what you guys gals think?

[Tikker]

personally, I've had the ez flash 3in 1 and a M3 lite perfect

i much much preferred the M3 lite, but it was 4x the price of the ez flash

imo, it's a much better card, and it allows you to add a 2nd microSD card

[DanTheManMS]

The slot-2 CycloDS carts are clones of the Supercards, so they're not that good for GBA gaming due to the slow RAM. The M3 Lite would be good if you want a standalone slot-2 device with its own storage (make sure you get an M3 Perfect and not an M3 Pro), while the 3in1 would make a good cheap addon to your current slot-1 device. Note that the 3in1 only contains 32 MB of NOR space for GBA games. You keep your files on your slot-1 microSD and copy them to the 3in1 as needed. The M3 Lite would not have that problem, though it would be more expensive.

[Mortext]

With the 3 in 1 it seems that storage is its only constraint but as long as I can stores files on the slot 1 then the space limits dont really come into play unless i want to play a game larger than what it can handle IE 32+ megs. This isnt a big deal as i mostly play rpg's and usually only play one at a time so playing it and removing it and loading another from the slot one isnt a problem.I took a quick look at what i have and i dont seem to have anything that surpasses 16 megs, is there a game that goes over the 32 meg limit of the card?

Thanks for the replies, great to have knowledgable answers comming back my way.

[DanTheManMS]

The only GBA files I know of that are over 32 MB are some of the GBA Video files like the Shrek movie, and I don't think they've been dumped. This is because 32 MB is the theoretical maximum size for a GBA cartridge, so anything after that has to use some form of bankswitching, which the current dumper programs probably can't handle.

Note that games 16 MB in size or smaller can also be loaded into the 3in1's PSRAM, which greatly shortens the load time, but the data is lost after poweroff. If you plan to be playing the same game for a while, you should probably write it to NOR which will take a while to begin with but after that the data will stay on the cart until you erase it. If you plan to switch games often, load them into PSRAM for convenience.

[hdofu]

personally, I've had the ez flash 3in 1 and a M3 lite perfect

i much much preferred the M3 lite, but it was 4x the price of the ez flash

imo, it's a much better card, and it allows you to add a 2nd microSD card

is it better for speed issues with gba games? I know supercards suffer from speed issues with bigger games.

[Tikker]

I've never had any issues with my m3 lite at all

works great in my old GBA SP as well, which is a big bonus imo