iSmart Premium Hands-on Impressions

iSmart Premium Hands-on Impressions NEW NDS Flash Kit

The iSmart Premium by iSmartDS has arrived and is currently being tested for a full GBATemp review. Until the review is complete take a moment to read through the "hands-on" impressions. Be sure to post any comments after the "hands-on" post, posted below.  Hands-on Impressions Post  Discuss

The iSmart Premium from iSmartDS is a new entry into the DSi Flash Kit $12-$15 category. The card supports the DS, DS Lite, DSi, and DSi XL (LL). The iSmartDS Team has included an in-game menu which offers save-states, in-game guides, and NDS soft-reseting. The card boasts an Anti-Piracy routine which should allow all current and expected anti-piracy measures to be circumvented, similar to the SCDS2 but without the on-board CPU. In addition, the development team has stated that the card supports faster read speeds, a "smart" save file size detection routine, action replay cheats, multi-lingual support, and more.


The iSmart Premium supports a variety of skin-able options which include not only the theme itself but button placement as well. The iSmart Premium skins are backwards compatible with the EZ Vi Flash Kit. While they are stored as a .DAT formatted file no official iSmartDS skinning tool has been released.


The software [kernel] boots into an introductory screen much like the SCDS2. This initial menu allows the user to choose from various system settings. The system settings include system language, rumble strength, 3in1 mode (rumble, GBA link), and theme selections. Users can also boot NDS files from this initial menu or GBA files via a supported external EZ 3in1 expansion kit. EZ 3in1 options include Nor-flashing, PSRAM flashing, and cancel. Moonshell can also be launched from this initial menu screen as well, if the software is present on the microSD card.


Booting into the "Nintendo DS Games" option loads the theme and provides the user with more options and the ability to launch ROMs and Homebrew. These additional options include softreset, real-time save, in-game guide, cheats, and download play (on/off). Once these options have been set they will be saved on a per-ROM basis, meaning there are no global variables for adjusting these options, something I hope to see changed in a future software update.

The in-game menu key combination is L+R+Select. The key combination works most of the time but tends to fail at random. Failures were experienced on the same ROMs run in different circumstances with different options enabled. The in-game menu appears to behave a bit buggy during initial testing, something I hope the iSmartDS Team can iron out by the next software release. The most commonly used feature, soft-reset, is trapped in the in-game menu resulting in some frustration as my DS Lite and DS XL had to be power-cycled more often than not. The menu appears to also suffer from navigation sensitivity, pressing DOWN for example will sometimes result in options being skipped over as the highlight bar jumps directly to the bottom of the options listing. The softreset option reboots the software back to the top-most menu, something for which I faulted the SCDS2 Team in my review. As softreset only supports NDS ROMs and not Homebrew it makes no sense that the software does not simply reboot back to the NDS ROM directory. However, without a way to go back to the top most menu (hitting B to go back would be a welcome edition) the soft-reset is actually a software soft-reset that happens to be launched from the in-game menu which can only be accessed while playing an NDS ROM.

NDS ROM compatibly was very high during initial testing, while some popular NDS Homebrew files failed to load at all. However, while some problems have been experienced a full round of testing has yet to be completed. The software shows great ROM support at this point, especially with the included anti-piracy patching routines. As some of you may know, I am a Homebrew enthusiast, and I will make sure to put this card through its paces for the full review.

The team will be releasing source code/SDK, but no further information has been made public. The question as to the reason behind a source code release will be tackled in the full review.

For more information on this new company and their Flash Kit check the homepage link below. Be sure to post any questions in the thread below. I'll do my best to answer any questions or save answers for the full review (pending a query of the official team).



 Homepage

Well, this looks just like an EZVi with a little bit changed booting sequence.
Same menu, same features, same compatibility problems...

This reminds me of the iedge
iedge = cycloDS
ismart = EZ Flash

it's a clone but it's not a clone

Is the cart's firmware updatable, in case of DSi update?

Your not actually going to consider buying it are you?

Thats so mean!

I remember you on the USA forum. Yeah you are right the DLDI driver really need to be improved on EZ5i.
Homebrews compatibility could be better, i agree.
About the ismart premium, i have really no idea. I'm still waiting for a sample to test that.

For now we can't say, don't you think ?

Edited by Mbmax, 28 August 2010 - 09:58 AM.

fascinating this works on dsi


YAY 500 POSTS WOOOOO

Edited by mezut360, 28 August 2010 - 10:17 AM.

it means it works on DSi,not use the features of it though

another flash cart, wonder if it will have good firmware releases.

but there kernal is open source so a unoffical one could be made.

Yeah but for example, The original R4's firmware died at 1.18 then YSmenu got released, that died shortly after (but people are updating it now days.) And now the Wood Firmware from YWG. It took a while to get this far so if the support for this flashcart dies, it might be pretty useless for a while.

That depends if its worth getting, the iSmart team claims they have experience in the flashcard industry in their homepage however it seems as though they want a "free ride" at gaining profits by imitating the acekard franchise, its really quite obvious if you ponder on their motives. They release their SDK [Acekard move], maintain in the $12-15 range [Currently at the AceKard price], provide minimal features [that have bugs] and its a gd clone.

Clearly they want in on AceKard's "money train"...

Btw I'd like to throw this out, of all the names you can brand your product why "iSmart"? Names like "G6", "M3" and AceKard sound cool and simple instead of the worned out "i" placed in almost every word [ex: DSi, iplayer, ihome, iCook etc.]

I doubt the ak RPG was at this price when acekard team released it.