Ok so it took me way too long to find the answers to all my questions about the DS and how to run homebrew. There are many well written tutorials out there on how it all works but they all assume a very basic level of knowledge about the DS that is impossible to find and seems too basic to get any straight answers in the forums. I now have my DS lite running homebrew and backups so I am going to do my best to share what I have learned concerning that missing link of basics with those looking to get started. If I am missing something or flat out wrong with any of these statements then please correct me and lets keep this thread alive so many others like me can get on the path to wonderful world of DS homebrew. Ok. First when I say "homebrew" I am speaking of those programs (and there are many) that are legal and written by non-commercial programmers, usually at home, for use on the Nintendo DS. When you speak of running downloaded commercial copies of games, this is illegal and you won't find any help here or in many other forums. However, having said that, when you find info on running homebrew it is usually synonymous with running legal backups of games you own also. Ok then, on to the basics. The Nintendo DS is designed to look first in the DS cart slot. (the smaller slot on top where you insert the DS commercial game). Therein lies the problem because of the limitations on size of that slot. Before the DS there were already successful gameboy hacking utilities called flashcarts. These were devices that had onboard memory and you simply ran a USB cable from the flashcart to your computer where you would load your games and/or homebrew programs. You would then insert the flashcart into the slot on your gameboy where the game would normally go and viola. So the challenge was to find a way to get the ds to boot from the gameboy slot instead of the DS card slot so that we could use the flashcarts to do the same thing that they had already learned how to do with the gameboy advanced and gameboy advanced sp. This is where the pass devices come in. They (developers/hackers with too much time on their hands) found a way to force the DS to look to the gameboy slot on the bottom first when booting. There are now several different pass devices on the market. Some examples are passme passkey passkey2 passcard2 passcard3 (passcard) = my current favorite and the one I use passgas (j/k) The point is that there are several different pass devices on the market. These devices fit into the DS cart on top and when the DS is turned on they force it to look to the gameboy slot for boot info. The next device that you need is the actual flashcart. Now again, there are several different types of flashcarts on the market so I won't attempt to list them all. The flashcart is the device that holds the memory cards (or sometimes on board memory) and has a firmware chip that will give you some sort of menu system for selecting games to run, loading video/music files etc. I am currently using the M3 which markets itself as a "movie player" but we all know what people really use it for. Up until recently you also needed to buy the actual memory chip which slides into the flashcart and holds all the data. I am using the sd version of the m3 flashcart so I purchased a sd 2gb mem card. The game files are so small that 2gb might be a little excessive but 1gb's are so cheap now that I wouldn't go less than that. Different flashcarts use different types of mem cards so make sure that you research what type of memory you have (or in my case, what type was the cheapest to buy) before you pick your flashcart. So given this example here there are three things that you need to run games and homebrew on your ds. 1. Pass device (needed to force the ds to boot from the gba slot) 2. Flashcart (needed to run the games and homebrew. fits in gba slot) 3. mem card (could be sd mem, mini-sd, micro-sd, compact flash etc) Now I said earlier that recently there have been some breakthroughs and the scenario has changed a bit. Technology has granted us the capability of shrinking our pcb's so small that some manufacturers have actually been able to fit the flashcart and the pass device into the same piece of hardware that fits into the DS cart slot. So you no longer need to even use the GBA slot! So no more large pieces of hardware uglying up that new slick DS Lite you just bought (I just made up that word). The last one I saw used MicroSD mem cards. Recently there has been a device that combines all three into one piece of heavenly hardware that fits snugly into your DS cart slot. Its made by Team Xodus (very well respected on the xbox front) and called the DS-EXTREME. That’s right, pass device, flashcart, and onboard memory all as one unit with a built in USB connection for transferring files. Update 01/02-2007 I just ordered the new M3 Simply that is similar to the DS-EXTREME mentioned above except that it uses a removable micro SD mem card instead of having the storage on board. Will report back with my review So things are really progressing on the DS scene right now! Many choices for hardware. I hope that I have cleared up some of the confusion and frustrations that I was facing when getting started!
good guide. also wanted to point out that you can download a lot of homebrew applications from sites like http://www.maxconsole.net
Thanks pakixd. Maxconsole is great. There are also many other guides out there on what to do AFTER you get all your stuff and how to acutally load and install the games. I just didn't even know which hardware to buy. I was way confused
I believe that you cannot. I think you need a flashcart for the gba slot to do that. I'm sure that sooner or later someone will figure out how though
I am not sure. I think that M3 Simply only plays NDS games only. I heard that is does not support GBA games.
