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DS Misc > Flashcard Guide.

#105032 - Barnard - Thu Oct 05, 2006 11:19 am

Could someone in the know write a guide on the different flashcards available?
I've been using an old GBA flashcard with my DS for sometime, at first most things ran fine, only sometimes with a little bit of fiddling with the make.exe program that came with Moonshell. But now most of the new exciting things such as Beup and the weather program have got me stumped. I need to know whats what!

Fat, non-fat. What is a GBA flashcard?
Will a .nds to .gba converter ever appear?
Is it too much work to intergrate things such as .bmps and sounds into the actual homebrew program? instead of having a tree of directories?

#105036 - theDJ - Thu Oct 05, 2006 11:58 am

Hi... I can't comment on most of the "flash cards" out at the moment, because I don't have them. However I do have a Supercard SD, and it works extremely well. I have only had problems with 1 or 2 apps (out of over a hundred I have tried). It is really not a flash card, but just an adaptor so that you can run homwbrew off an SD card (like one you would use in a camera). Most of the other cards these days do the same.

Quote:
Fat, non-fat. What is a GBA flashcard?

Fat is a file system (the way files are sorted on the media). Almost all cards use fat, but some use Fat 16 (an older format) and others use Fat 32. Windows can format your card in either, so this shouldn't really be a problem. A flash card is a card with built in flash memory, which is read only from the gameboy.
Quote:
Will a .nds to .gba converter ever appear?

Absolutely not. The GBA just does not have the processing power of the NDS, and could not run the programs out. Also such a thing would be virtually impossible to code.
Quote:
Is it too much work to intergrate things such as .bmps and sounds into the actual homebrew program? instead of having a tree of directories?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't most homebrew games have bmp's and sounds embedded in the .gba or .nds file??

#105058 - Devil_Spawn - Thu Oct 05, 2006 3:47 pm

do you mean .ds.gba to .nds? if so just rename

#105183 - josath - Fri Oct 06, 2006 4:41 pm

Devil_Spawn wrote:
do you mean .ds.gba to .nds? if so just rename


That's not such a good idea. ".nds" usually means a standard NDS format file (as used in commercial games)
".ds.gba" usually means, a loader with a valid GBA header + a standard NDS file appended to it.

If you want to convert from ".ds.gba" to a standard ".nds", you can try a little converter tool I made:
http://davr.drunkencoders.com/pme2nds.zip

It only works on about 80% of .ds.gba files (due to the fact that .ds.gba could contain a custom loader), and usually anything that is .ds.gba only, and not .nds, wont work when converted.

If you want to convert from .nds to .ds.gba, that is easy, just use dsbuild.exe (included in devkitarm).

#105193 - Devil_Spawn - Fri Oct 06, 2006 5:33 pm

im using a gba flashcard (supercard) never had a problem renaming, its just what im used to

#106327 - Barnard - Tue Oct 17, 2006 10:20 pm

Thanks for the info guys!

Back to lurking I go!