Hacking Why did slot 2 die out?

[Lemmy Koopa]

Hi, I'm just wondering if there's any solid reasons why slot 2 flash cards died out. They both support GBA and DS mode, so I would feel like it would be a win-win situation. Did people/companies just no longer really care about GBA? It seems like it could have really been put into good use with RAM expansions that most slot-2 cards had. Maybe the removal of slot 2 in present DS systems like DSi was accounted for?

 

[Pong20302000]

well with a DSTwo you can load GBA games on a 3DS
so no real need for a Slot 2 card

 

[pyromaniac123]

The lord giveth and the lord taketh away.

 

[muckers]

Slot 2 died out because the GBA died out. It had a good run, let's leave it at that.

 

[Lemmy Koopa]

well with a DSTwo you can load GBA games on a 3DS
so no real need for a Slot 2 card

How solid is the emulation though?

 

[Alaude]

well with a DSTwo you can load GBA games on a 3DS
so no real need for a Slot 2 card

How solid is the emulation though?

Emulation is pretty good

 

[rehevkor]

Slot-2 died because the slow became obsolete from the DSi. But tbh the Supercard GBA emulation isn't *that* good..

 

[Pong20302000]

Slot-2 died because the slow became obsolete from the DSi. But tbh the Supercard GBA emulation isn't *that* good..

do you have a DSTwo?

i do and i have no problem with any games i have

get the settings ini file and you got no worries

 

[FAST6191]

It is not as good as the real thing Pong20302000, it it certainly a worthwhile feature but other than niceties like rapid fire buttons and button remapping the iSMM/DStwo/Iplayer GBA emulation is certainly not the same as the real deal (frameskip is usually needed, the odd graphical glitch and more). I am impressed it works as well as it does and if money is no real object (and frankly the iSMM and DSTwo are not expensive as far as hacking tools go) then such cards are a sound investment but I can fault nobody saying get a 3 in 1 or an EZ4 instead and flank it with one of the other viable flash carts of the moment.


Anyway why it died out- I imagine a combination of cost (NOR and RAM rather just something to pipe through commands to a piece of micro SD memory) and annoyance when having to patch ROM images to work (at the time it was gearing up for well over a thousand new games a year)- run a patch on a ROM from EZ4client or the supercard stuff and compare it to say one of the standalone fixes for a similar vintage ROM and then realise after that AP actually got serious. Most stopped updating around the time the DSi hit but I call coincidence there.

 

[RupeeClock]

Slot-2 cards aren't nearly as good for running DS games are Slot-1 cards are.
They were the only solution for running DS backups until the R4DS rolled out, and it made life a lot easier.

More than anything it featured on-the-fly patching and did not require you to pre-patch DS roms that can run from a Slot-2 device. Games also performed much better, often-times maybe even better than a retail cartridge as loading and saving times go.

I still have my Supercard Lite, it was good but even that could not run GBA games at full speed! Some games with intensive moments like the escape sequences of Wario Land 4 suffered slowdown.
I keep it around for running Wood Dumper now, since it's pretty much the best way to dump roms off your own DS cartridges.

 

[Rydian]

For DS games, slot-1 is the best. For GBA games, slot-2 is the best.

However the DSi, DSi XL, 3DS, and 3DS XL cannot use a slot-2 cart, and the DSi was released in 2008, so there's been a constantly-growing number of people who have no access to Slot-2... while in the meantime there's been emulation alternatives. DSTwo for slot-2, the PSP, some linux emulation devices, etc.

Also slot-2 carts are expensive to produce (need to include multiple types of expensive storage), most slot-1 carts are crazy-cheap (stick a MicroSD card slot on it and you're golden).

 

[FAST6191]

They were the only solution for running DS backups until the R4DS rolled out, and it made life a lot easier.

Going to have to take exception to that- the R4 certainly changed things (others were going with a savelist* and such where the R4's complete drag and drop and upgrade the kernel approach was somewhat more user friendly) and was instrumental in a lot more (it did quite well for cheats) but it was not the first (various things with ninja in the name have that honour) and not even the first to be good (many of the big and formerly big developers had devices out at the same time or before).

*I will always remember the loss of the savelist- some of those savelist kernels could still run ROM images long (more than year) after the R4 stopped being updated, but the reason I will remember is that it is a poignant example of user interface winning out over ability/functionality.

 

[rehevkor]

do you have a DSTwo?

Yeah. Most games are fine. But some are unplayable.

Doom II is the only example I can come up with off the top of my head[1][2] that stutters and is utterly unplayable.



[1] I'm aware there are probably homebrew versions of that, it's just an example.
[2] I think Doom II is also an example of a game that will refuse to save on a slot-2 device too.

 

[Lemmy Koopa]

Thanks for the informative posts, everyone!

I personally had no problems with any of the "hassle" that is required to run DS games on a slot 2. Patching was very simple unless I needed a patch outside what my game manager client could provide. It took pretty much the same amount of time to do simple patches, at least in my opinion.

I just felt like a slot-2 device was really worth it. There's a ton of emulators out there that work better than most of the DS versions of those emulators. It felt like if you had a slot-2 you covered so much more territory.

 

[RodrigoDavy]

My friend borrowed me his DS lite for one year, while he is studying in Germany. I use a combination of Acekard 2i in slot-1 and the EZ-flash V 3in1 in slot-2 so I can load any DS or GBA rom and homebrew from the slot-1 without needing to patch anything. (When I load a gba rom it copies the rom to the slot-2 ram)

By the way, I do think running games from slot-2 is way better than SCDS2 because there's no glitches, no frame skip, full speed all the time, compatibility with almost every gba game and the DS battery last longer running in GBA mode.

 

[FAST6191]

The hassle I was getting at for patching games to run from the GBA slot was on the part of the flash cart developers/patch developers (there were a handful of third parties giving it a go)- not having a new game work with a DS slot cart sporting a savelist (and to a slightly lesser extent R4 a like) was a shock where for GBA slot stuff it was completely ordinary. Add on the amount of effort required (which give or take some premade workarounds all involved staring at a debugger and coding in assembly) to create a working patch and I would not be in a hurry to maintain support for the GBA devices.

Given it was what mid 2006 when DS slot stuff started and early 2007 when it kicked off properly and it took until mid 2009 for it to stop (April 2009 for EZFlash and a few months later for supercard) it was a pretty good run.

 

[Guerillaz]

There are two reasons why it died out:

1. Nintendo can make more money re-releasing the GB, GBC, and GBA games for the newer systems.

2. It cost Nintendo more money to keep making it when no new games were planned for it.

So really, it's a profit deal.

 

[Whacka]

Remember DLDI patching everyone?
I have an M3 Perfect, it was great little card, the firmware updates dried up suddenly and new games that worked became fewer and fewer.
The last game I remember working (with an .ips patch as well) was 9 Hours 9 Persons 9 Doors.
Slot-2 cards had faster SD/CF access and perfect or near perfect GBA compatibilty (depending on the RAM on-cart), but all the patching seriously sucked.