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Hacking Emulation Homebrew What were your favourite DS Homebrew from back in the day?

MikeyTaylorGaming

MikeyTaylorGaming

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I'm thinking of making a video about the original R4DS cartridge as it was my very first delve into any kind of messing around with consoles and felt super nostalgic finding it under the bed yesterday! Also makes for a good excuse to re-shell, & re-battery my 2 consoles ahaha.

I recall a few things that blew my mind about it over time like, working out how to convert movies to watch on the DS, MSN messenger, Modding ROMs then putting them back together to play on OG console, and homebrew (emulators mostly). Probably the biggest thing was an SD card for released that it was so small it could fit in a DS Cartridge 😂

So, I wondered what some of your personal favourite things to do with your R4 (or any of the other thousands of flash carts) were?

It'll be difficult to show off MSN messenger of course, but I've got a VGA video filmed from one of the first phone cameras 18 years ago on an old channel I can steal all footage from for that 😅

Also, I take it this is probably the best place to download the files to get it working again after all these years, right? https://linfoxdomain.com/nintendo/ds/

Any help or feedback appreciated!
 
linfox's a good site, though https://sanrax.github.io/flashcart-guides/ is what I'd recommend. Linfox mostly has the official kernels for carts and doesn't have anything there newer than 2011, for some carts it'll be the same, but sometimes there's a better option for the kernel. Its just files on the SD so if there are multiple options you can try and see which you like.

I wasn't super around "back in the day" but some older homebrew that come to mind for me as cool are Colors! (first in the series that went on to be officially published on the 3DS, Switch, etc), Portal DS, DScraft, NitroTracker -- and of course emulators particularly Game Boy
 
Moonshell and DSOrganize for me.

I used them a ton back in the day.
So many nights spent up next to the window facing my neighbour's house to access their WIFI and use the very primitive web browser to download random stuff on my DS.

Life without a mobile phone back in 2009 as a teenager was completely different back then, I am telling ya.
 
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A small game where you trap the cat, but I don't know who made it.
:arrow: Chat_Noir_DS
20260721_163321.jpg
'Chat Noir' is a Flash game created by 伊東太郎(Taro Ito) in 2007, and it was inspired by ancient mathematical problems and Go strategies.

Creator and Release Date: The game was designed by Japanese game designer Taro Ito and released in 2007.
Original Link: It was initially published at http://www.gamedesign.jp/flash/chatnoir/chatnoir.html.
Game Name: "Chat Noir" is French for "black cat".
Inspiration: The game's concept comes from a classic mathematical problem known as the "Angel and Devil" problem. In this problem, on an infinite chessboard, an angel (the cat) and a devil (the player) take turns moving, and the question is whether the devil can eventually trap the angel.
 
Last edited by k66,
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I use GameYob all the time for playing GBC on DS. It feels faster and more responsive to me than playing GBC games from slot 2 using Jagoomba Color. The biggest drawback though is the sound emulation has a ton of problems, compared to Jagoomba.
 
DSMasterPlus (master system emulator)

LoneWolfDS (well known gamebooks)

Alas, not much... Maybe I'm misremembering, but for the 1st half of its lifespan most emulators were "better" (i.e. had better compatibility) on the gba. They do not count as DS homebrew for your enquiry; even if we all played them on this console. I for sure don't remember a NES emulator for the NDS, just used Pocketnes instead.
 
VinsCool said:
Moonshell and DSOrganize for me.
Click to expand...

Flame said:
Moonshell
Click to expand...

Veho said:
Moonshell, DSOrganize, Ikureader.

The DS was my main media player and ebook reader for years.
Click to expand...

emigre said:
Moonshell like everyone else though, just for videos. Or to be more specific, Moonshell 2. Who remembers the threads in getting rom loading with it?
Click to expand...
Wow, a ton of love for moonshell... I thought that was just like, the "CFW" of the R4, seem to remember a requirement to have MOONSHL.DAT or something on the SD card in order for the R4 to work but maybe I'm misremembering that and actually was using moonshell all along ahaha!

Will be looking into the setup again when my screen replacement and shell come :D Thanks for all the answers!

@Veho, I'm with you on that one. I used to convert to DPG, keep MP3s, and even have an image viewer for some reason. Had all my media on the DS at all times ahaha, very nostalgic.

I seem to also remember an app called Comic Reader DS or something like that that allowed you to view Manga. Can't remember what format the Manga had to be in, but had a pretty intuitive zoom and scroll function!
 
MoonShell - I used to convert YouTube videos to DPG to watch them out on trips when I didn't have internet access, the same when listening to music as since it supports the more common formats like MP3, it delivered better audio quality than Nintendo's music recorder thing since I had a DSi.
 

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