Gathering DS flashcard knowledge - DIY "opencard" idea

[Technicmaster0]

Plus, the flashcart scene is just weird, with so many models people still ask which one to use... we want to close that gap. One solution, actually open source for once in almost 20 years.

Plus the current available cards are crap. All of the good ones stopped production

I meant that it doesnt need to be functional on unmodded consoles, you can still want to use a flashcart instead of digital and needing to softmod isnt a big hurdle for that tbh.

That would be very lame tho. A big disadvantage of some cards available at the moment is that they don't work with the current 3DS firmware without patches. That's especially painfull for people that want to keep their system clean.

but again, if you do have a functional exploit that would allow it to run on dsi 1.4.5 and 3ds 11.17 without softmod, then why not

It doesn't need a CFW or something similar

 

[DSoryu]

Well the source code for BL2CK 1.30.4 is also available and that one only really needs a few fixes for perfect compatibility.

Which unfortunately also has a shitty codebase, that's why something much better is being written from the ground up.

 

[Deleted member 704126]

Which unfortunately also has a shitty codebase, that's why something much better is being written from the ground up.

If it looks like ugly ass YSMenu I'm gonna cry.

 

[Apache Thunder]

If it looks like ugly ass YSMenu I'm gonna cry.

Oh trust me it's gonna look better then YSMenu.

 

[Deleted member 702243]

Oh trust me it's gonna look better then YSMenu.

dancing LEDs?

 

[Technicmaster0]

dancing LEDs?

I doubt that the menu will be compatible with DS-X :/

 

[Apache Thunder]

I doubt that the menu will be compatible with DS-X :/

Well the DLDI code has been open source for some time so I suppose they could add support for it...though performance is going to be terrible. That card is a meme. It's actually worse then EZP performance wise.

 

[xbmbmx]

I don't really have anything useful to add currently - uni has eaten up al the time I thought I would be able to spend on this project.

However I think it's very cool to see so many people still genuinely interested in an open source flashcard! Very nice to hear about the RP2040 based open source card too!

Someday™ I will have enough time™ to put into this and hopefully generate some useful input.

 

[SylverReZ]

I wonder if NathaanTFM is still working on his flashcart. It's been a long while since we've gotten an update.

Other than that, I'm interested for the DSPico and what developments are being made.

 

[Luisao]

I know it might differ a little bit from what your goals are, but it would be a great addition to the community if there were an open-source project of an N-card alike, because that would allow for 100% compatibility with game features, especially the ones that require reading sectors of the ROM without loading it (like on the pokemon relocator on BW/B2W2), not to mention that IR or BT support could be added more easily, as the nds-bootstrap project figured out how to grant access to the hardware when the from needs to.

 

[Jayro]

Honestly I'm surprised @SylverReZ hasn't just made a DS flash cart by now.

 

[SylverReZ]

Honestly I'm surprised @SylverReZ hasn't just made a DS flash cart by now.

If only if I could, that would've been a revolution.. a Revolution for DS.

 

[Jayro]

If only if I could, that would've been a revolution.. a Revolution for DS.

Given your knowledge, I bet you could do it tbh. (But I know financially it costs a lot for bulk PCB stuff.)

 

[SylverReZ]

Given your knowledge, I bet you could do it tbh. (But I know financially it costs a lot for bulk PCB stuff.)

Thanks @Jayro.
Maybe one day if I figure something out.

 

[Jayro]

Thanks @Jayro.
Maybe one day if I figure something out.

I'd buy a few of them for sure. You could be the hero 2025 or 2026 deserves.

 

[NathaanTFM]

I wonder if NathaanTFM is still working on his flashcart. It's been a long while since we've gotten an update.

I mean, the goal for my card was to run DS games. I was not planning on doing a flashcart. Might take a look at this some day, but DSPico is already doing just that and I'd start from scratch and rewrite these game patches myself anyway (if they're required, and I'm confident they are because a MicroSD card is just too slow for this task afaik. Maybe lowering the transfer speed in ROM header would be enough, but I would not bet on that).

stm32cart is limited in the fact that it has no save chip (you could use an external flash chip like actual DS games and it shouldn't cause any problems afaik), does not support DSi games and only NOR Flash chips. A good update would be to implement NAND flash support (can store lot of data, is cheaper, but slower), but I need to make some dev board for that and I'm considering rewriting it to target the RP2040 or RP2350 instead.

 

[Nirim000]

I don't really have anything useful to add currently - uni has eaten up al the time I thought I would be able to spend on this project.

However I think it's very cool to see so many people still genuinely interested in an open source flashcard! Very nice to hear about the RP2040 based open source card too!

Someday™ I will have enough time™ to put into this and hopefully generate some useful input.

I was literally thinking about doing that when I have less on my plate, after seeing that vid about weird flashcard, I'v done smaller more dense PCB already, and that chip can arbitrarily control any GPIO's at impressive speeds, but software wise I don't know anything, I have done low level C++ stuff but nothing like that.

Post automatically merged: May 27, 2025

I just want a hardware platform for toe dipping into reverse emulation and the Pico series GPIO are fast as fuck and make the PCB design way easier. Also the only good commercial choice is out of production and now 5x the price.

 

[xbmbmx]

Hi everyone!


I'm still (very, very) slowly chipping away at this project. Uni has eaten away a lot of my time, but I hope to loose myself a bit more in this project once I am graduated.

But, extremely exciting news: the dspico released! You can find the repositories here: https://github.com/LNH-team/.

I'm really excited, and will get one made ASAP.

 

[Gericom]

Hi everyone!


I'm still (very, very) slowly chipping away at this project. Uni has eaten away a lot of my time, but I hope to loose myself a bit more in this project once I am graduated.

But, extremely exciting news: the dspico released! You can find the repositories here: https://github.com/LNH-team/.

I'm really excited, and will get one made ASAP.

For completeness. This is the official website: https://www.lnh-team.org/

 

[k66]

Can it support DSi apps, like TWL-EVA?