Can a Homebrew Only Flash Cart Be Made ?

[policrat]

I was under the impression Nintendo has their own flash card in the pipeline; I guess being partially why they're stomping out the upstarters right now. Where did I hear this?

[NeroMaverick]

It wouldn't really matter, a homebrew only flashcart will most likely be hacked to work with commercial games... either that, or the commercial games will be hacked to work with the flashcart, either way it will still bring the same situation we have now.

I can see where Nintendo is getting at, people who own the system need to start buying the games, how else are the companies supposed to make money/know what we like.

I can also see our side of the story, we love our homebrew and not having to lug around additional cases just to hold our favorite games...

I can even see the side of the pirate... why pay for things... when you can get them for free :P... sort of... You have to admit, there is a point to that, even if you don't agree.

We'll see as time goes on.

[Eviltaco64]

I think there could be a homebrew loader or something like that made that could bypass the homebrew only thing and boot pirated software.

[spinal_cord]

It wouldn't really matter, a homebrew only flashcart will most likely be hacked to work with commercial games... either that, or the commercial games will be hacked to work with the flashcart, either way it will still bring the same situation we have now.

Nobody paying attention today? The Datel Games'n'Music card is HOMEBREW ONLY, it has not been hacked and has been around for ages. It is not possible to play commercial games from it. It is the product that you are all saying can't or wont be done, and it is OLD, homebrew coders have been using it for a long time now, google it or something.

Commercial games do not get hacked to run on a card, that would be a complete waste of time and effort asit is the cards firmware that should be doing that. The firmware needs to patch the games to load differently from a different (from nintendo offical cards) card as well as set up the DS hardware to handle it. There is a great ds coder called chishm who wrote a homebrew only loader that works on most current (and probably future) cards, it does not load commercial games, and if you try, rather than just not load, the DS crashes. Proving yet again that it is entirely possible and easier than commercial compatability.

[robman84]

there would be a Market for it but nintendo are unlikely to embrace such a device unless they had an ongoing revenue stream from each title produced. So many commercial games already fall way below the quality of the top homebrew games that they would be killed if there was a readily available source of legal free games of better quality. I could certainly see ninty doing a vc store or even a closed app store like apple.

[megaxzeo]

I don't know, this just seems to me like something nintendo should be trying to take advantage of, rather then destory.

Think about this, treat the files the same way the music companys are treating their files.

Consider this. Nintendo produces a flash cart that works for the DS, or even possibly future portables. Every person who buys this flash cart ( think ipod ) can download the games from nintendo's website for a price. And the download can be linked somehow to a specific flash cart so that the file cant be traded. Kind of like burn rights for mp3's.

Not only would nintendo profit from it ( less piracy, less money spent on producing cards, paper manuals, etc.. ), but so would the users because the cost of the games could be dropped slightly. And they wouldent have to make room for like, 20 carts or have to worry about loosing them.

Of course no situation is ever going to be perfect, your ALWAYS going to have people that are going to steal, hack, and get their own way for free.

I dont know, any other thoughts?

[Jeric]

Sure Datel's GnM disallows pirated roms, but lets face facts. The GnM is a crummy card that's terrible when it comes to homebrew compatability (though it DOES seem to behave better when you stick to the card it comes with).

This from a GnM owner that's continually frustrated with how things like to either not work, or simply break with him.

[Brifry]

I have a Games n Music card, and yeah most of the things said are true. But for all of you who think that commercial games will run, that's false, unless of course an updated firmware, but that won't happen. Even if you could boot commercial games, the read speed is sooo slow it's ridiculous. I mean, some of the bigger homebrew takes up to a minute to boot up. So even if commercial games worked, they'd be unbearable to play. And as for homebrew, it's great, I don't know what some of you are talking about. Yeah, for some select homebrew it's a hassle to boot up homebrew, but everything works fantastic once it's boot up. I personally have never run into any homebrew that had DLDI that I couldn't get to run. Now, if you're talking about piracy, sure it can run emulators, and there's no way of stopping it, so saying it can run pirated games is also true. But that's not the biggest part of what Nintendo is concerned about. I'm pretty sure they're basically targeting the actual NDS roms, the don't want to lose money on current software. I mean, the older games are run on emulators on every system imaginable, and I don't think they could ever stop that, I personally believe they're trying to stop the NDS piracy, and with the Games n Music, the piracy can't happen. Or if it somehow became possible, it wouldn't be worth it. Have you ever played a game and it just kept lagging? Well, it's not worth it, the speed is just not there.

[crookedmouth]

Sure Datel's GnM disallows pirated roms, but lets face facts. The GnM is a crummy card that's terrible when it comes to homebrew compatability (though it DOES seem to behave better when you stick to the card it comes with).

This from a GnM owner that's continually frustrated with how things like to either not work, or simply break with him.

I don't think the GnM is a crummy card at all. It runs every DLDI homebrew I've thrown at it. Sure jenesisDS needs to be run through spinal cords Menu program, but that is an easy work-around. Perhaps you should try Spinal's menu to try to fix your problem's your having with other apps/games.
Go and get yourself a 1Gig Sandisk MicroSD and use v1 of the DLDI patch. It works great with the GnM,Don't get a 2gig though.The 1G should be able to be found cheaply too.
Another thing that is funny, is that Nintendo went after Datel for the GnM, something to do with the way it's built or something.
Anyway I agree Brifry,GnM gets a bad wrap when IMO, it's homebrew compatibility is very good. The only problem is the slow read speeds, so games like Doom,Quake and the large NeoGeo games run with lots of lag.

[Sonny_Jim]

The Datel GnM IS a crummy card, the only reason is that it's popular is the fact that you can buy it locally rather than online.