Nintendo DS Redux

A long time ago i was playing with Liam's new DS and thought it was a clever little platform with a lot of potential. It has 802.11b wireless, a touch pad, sound etc in a compact package. A few months ago i picked up an R4 card for his DS but never got around to doing much with it.

Today i downloaded and installed Moonshell 2 to the card on a new 1 gig micro SD card. Tried an 8 gig card but it must be too big. Will have to try a 4 or 2 gig card because 1 gig is a bit small. The moonshell install can take about 30-60mb, depending on functions. See: http://www.ds-xtra.com/MoonShell2

Anyway, the goal was to make the DS into a nice travel machine with photos, music, movies and games - a poor man's iTouch. I had played with the Sony PSP for a while as that also has wireless and a nicer screen. The DS seems to have a more active developer community.

Once Moonshell was installed i ran the LanguageSelect.exe program to set the language to English. The program is written in Japanese and some of the translations are a bit rough but Liam was able to navigate ver 1 ok and version 2.10 is a real improvement. It also contains a bunch of utilities, such as a file converter for movies. Since most movies Liam watches are on Youtube (we don't have TV) I used http://keepvid.com/ to capture Youtube videos and downloaded them in .FLV format and to use the dpgenc DPG video converter included with Moonshell in the dpgtools folder. Now if netflix would write an nds app...

I plugged the microSD card into my pc and created movies, photos and music folders and copied over some files. The next step was to get the shell to run automatically when the DS is booted up - otherwise you have to select the NDS file.

When 'moonshl2.nds' is renamed into' DEFAULT.NDS ', MoonShell2 is started automatically but there is no audio when playing music or video files.

The moonshl2_AltLoader_DKPr27.nds is an alternative loader and renaming this to DEFAULT.NDS solved the problem. Now movies and music play - excellent!

To add applications see: http://dl.qj.net/nintendo-ds/homebrew-applications.html which lists a lot of NDS downloads. You can also get roms ripped from games if you want. Of more use is being able to make backup roms of the games you bought and being able to put a bunch of them on a single card for travel.

Nintendo actively discourages the homebrew developers by changing things - for example this won't work on his DS XL he got for xmas. Oddly enought, despite the bigger and brighter screens, he prefers the convenience of having multiple games so he uses the older DS much more! If Nintendo wanted to sell to the adult market they should open up the platform by:

- moving from 802.11 b to at least G
- creating an app store for downloading of apps, movies, music directly to the ds
- allow third party developers to write apps for the app store

When liam gets older he will probably give up the DS for an iphone/itouch. If the R4 card worked on the DS XL i would trade my netbook to Liam for it and use it at work. It writes memos, keeps track of appointments, takes photos, surf's the web and can play the odd game. There is even a ebook reader app for the DS. I would actually prefer the DS to my iTouch as a portable device because of the card slot and the stylus. My fingers are just too big to use the iTouch/iPhone keypad so it sits unused and unloved.

Photo 1 - DS Organizer - Calendar



Photo 2 - Music



Photo 3 - Photos




Photo 4 - Movies