m3 simply all i need?

ok, i just did a little looking around and am getting that m3 simply is probably the best one there is right now? i dont have a DS but am thinking about getting one after playing my little cousins DS.

in a review somewhere it said it cant do download play? whats download play?

and will the m3 be all i need to do everything? other than a micro SD card? what things cant i do with just a m3 card?

m3 is a slot 1 device right, so is there a slot 2 device i could use along with it to give me "everything"? or is there always going to be a pro/con thing going on? =/

Along with a microSD card, that's all you'll need, yes. The advantages of slot-2 devices are:
1. GBA functionality
2. extra RAM for usage with certain homebrew apps like DSLinux and SnezziDS

You can get both GBA compatibility and extra RAM with the "EZ-V 3-in-1 expansion pack" which fits in DS Lites only and works alongside a slot-1 device. You use software on the DS itself to write files from your microSD card to the expansion pack. It's a fairly cheap solution if you want the best of both worlds.

so i get the EZ-V 3-in-1 expansion pack along with the m3? what about the r4? is that really the exact same thing as the m3? there is a deal on that one right now for cheaper =s

what does downloadplay mean? i cant find what it means anywhere...

Both the R4 and M3 Simply (which I just bought from RealHotStuff.com - fast service but bad return policy (everything is sold as is no returns except for defects)) are essentially the same thing from what I've read. So far I've played around with moonshell and though the player works i can't seem to get the encoder/converter software to work. Remember that its all 'homebrew' meaning the majority of stuff needs to be done by programmers out there smart enough to figure out how to make all this work. And that is why I'm on this site to sort things out.

I'm tried Datel's Music n more (can buy from Bestbuy) which isnt that bad the player is a version of moonshell and the conversion software was pretty easy to use. The only thing with the player was that each time you exit the program you start from the beginning of the movie and there is no way to 'skip' or advance through scenes, which was why I returned it.

Yes, you can get the M3 Simply or the R4 with the EZ-V 3-in-1 to get both slot-1 ease of use and slot-2 GBA compatibility.

I'd highly recommend against the Datel Games N' Music card. It's good for the "music" part of the title, but very few homebrew games actually run on it, and it doesn't have a DLDI file so that rules out a lot of homebrew that accesses the media card's filesystem.

Just finally gotten M3 Simply to work right. I tried using the dpgtools 1.7 to convert movies and it kept getting errors so I went with the dpgtools that came with M3 Simply along with the same moonshell program and both worked like a charm on a Nintendo DS lite. Awesome product for videos so far. Havent tried to play games just yet.

Yeah, the M3 Simply menu is based off 1.6 if I remember correctly, so if you use a converter that comes with a newer version, it won't work. You could just install the newer version of Moonshell and use that to watch videos converted with the newer software, though I'm not sure exactly how you'd do that. Perhaps you just need to delete the old Moonshell file in your firmware folder and replace it with the new one with the same name.

I just stuck with the moonshell and dpgtools that came with the M3 and it seems to be running fine. So why mess with a good thing. I think with the newer version you have to merge the dldi files and find the right version for your card, etc. But definitely the m3 simply is a great card. Granted, by buying the card to play video, it all adds up to the price of a PSP with does that without extra hardware. But in the end I prefer a DS than PSP due to the games. I returned my PSP to the store.