Front-page DSPico QuickReturn — Return to the Pico menu without rebooting

Coderkei · Oct 11, 2026

ChronoCrossfangirl2002 said:
Okay so: alot of the r4 card clones essentially had a time bomb that was basically a internal count down that would cause the cart to cease function after said given time which required a work around such as ysmenu to avoid the time bomb going off inevitably.

This keeps popping up over and over and I just want to clear things up, its not built into the cart and never was, the "time bomb" you speak of was a time expiry built into older versions of the R4iMenu kernels of r4isdhc.com 2014+ and r4i-sdhc.com carts (colloquially known as "DEMON" carts). It was to force users to upgrade the kernel to the latest version of R4iMenu.

It was entirely in software and switching the kernel to YSMenu solved it. The latest version of R4iMenu also now have this "time bomb" removed now (v4.3 and v1.87b), although these days its better to run the DSTT port of Pico-Loader on these carts now.

VideoGameMore · Oct 11, 2026

impeeza said:
Why do fork instead of collaborate with the main repo and make it better?

Its the best way for me to cut and build without disrupting the main flow of the project. Then when I hit a milestone (like where I am now) I submit a draft PR back to them to decide if they want to incorporate it or not. I have done that so they might choose to include it as is or make some changes to fit their needs.

ChronoCrossfangirl2002 · Oct 11, 2026

Coderkei said:
This keeps popping up over and over and I just want to clear things up, its not built into the cart and never was, the "time bomb" you speak of was a time expiry built into older versions of the R4iMenu kernels of r4isdhc.com 2014+ and r4i-sdhc.com carts (colloquially known as "DEMON" carts). It was to force users to upgrade the kernel to the latest version of R4iMenu.

It was entirely in software and switching the kernel to YSMenu solved it. The latest version of R4iMenu also now have this "time bomb" removed now (v4.3 and v1.87b), although these days its better to run the DSTT port of Pico-Loader on these carts now.

Right, but whether it was in the cart or not it was still something to be aware of at least for awhile, but as of now I don't think the semantics of it really matter much anymore.

derivativeoflog7 · Oct 11, 2026

impeeza said:
Why do fork instead of collaborate with the main repo and make it better?

Forking is the first step in creating a pull request, that's how contributing on GitHub works

impeeza · Oct 11, 2026

derivativeoflog7 said:
Forking is the first step in creating a pull request, that's how contributing on GitHub works

yep, ofcourse but if you are willing to colaborate to the main branch you do not fork and start to release separated branch. thas is how a derivation is created and later is a mess of versions.

JORGETECH · Oct 11, 2026

impeeza said:
Why do fork instead of collaborate with the main repo and make it better?

The author of the fork already submitted a pull request to the original project, awaiting review.

https://github.com/LNH-team/pico-loader/pull/228

Also, a lot of developers prefer first forking the repository and the merging their contributions to the original repository, by doing that they can work in an isolated environment.

Post automatically merged: Oct 11, 2026

NostalgicMillennial said:
Since this thing is basically a raspberry pi, I am waiting for either a hardware revision or software that will let me record and capture NDS

I doubt that will ever happen since the DSPico doesn't use the same chip as the main Raspberry Pi boards (full-fledged CPU and GPU solution) but the RP2040 microcontroller chip that uses a much less powerful ARM Cortex M0+ core (two of them actually). But maybe in the far future such thing is possible with a more powerful microcontroller.

derivativeoflog7 · Oct 11, 2026

impeeza said:
yep, ofcourse but if you are willing to colaborate to the main branch you do not fork and start to release separated branch. thas is how a derivation is created and later is a mess of versions.

Nah, people do this all the time, if you develop a new feature you may as well compile the project and release it so that people can test it; also anyone can create PRs from any fork even if they don't own it, tho admittedly I'm not sure how common it is.
It's also not wise for repository owners to give blanket access to anyone who promises a new feature, while I'm sure GitHub has some protections against it, theoretically anyone can do a force push and rewrite the entire history of the repo or mess with other stuff (even if GH has protections, it would probably be a bit of a headache for the repo owner), so forks and PRs are the standard way.

NitroRevolutionNX · Oct 12, 2026

Why such a basic feature isn't baked in is beyond me... Even a cheap R4 clone has it, but the open-source alternative doesn't?

impeeza · Oct 12, 2026

NitroRevolutionNX said:
Why such a basic feature isn't baked in is beyond me... Even a cheap R4 clone has it, but the open-source alternative doesn't?

Because it's a new firmware. Anybody is welcome to take an ide and start coding the features needed or wanted

NitroRevolutionNX · Oct 12, 2026

impeeza said:
Because it's a new firmware. Anybody is welcome to take an ide and start coding the features needed or wanted

Makes sense! Thanks for the explanation

The Real Jdbye · Oct 12, 2026

retro_tastic said:
Amazing! We are now just missing a proper save state support to make this an ultimate flashcart...

Would be cool if it allowed automatic quick save on soft reset. I don't think any DS flashcart has implemented that before.

Post automatically merged: Oct 12, 2026

NostalgicMillennial said:
Since this thing is basically a raspberry pi, I am waiting for either a hardware revision or software that will let me record and capture NDS

A flashcart does not have the capability to capture the screens. It would have to be done in software, likely resulting in slowdowns because the game has to be paused just to take a screenshot, now imagine that 30 times a second.
Keeping in mind also that the cartridge slot does not have enough bandwidth to transmit one screen at 60 FPS, let alone both screens, and the DS is not nearly powerful enough to encode the capture into a format that would be smaller, so the best you could probably hope for is 1 screen at 30 FPS or both screens at 15 FPS. That's not even including the bandwidth that the game itself uses, so further slowdowns could be caused whenever the game is trying to load data at the same time as the screen capture is running.

I believe the GBA slot is faster so that could be a way around some of those limitations, but the obvious caveat is that you would need a GBA flashcart and a compatible DS model.

This is all theoretical of course. Software screen capture inside a running DS game is not straightforward, and nobody's actually done this before.

airosd · Thursday at 3:14 AM

Hi there! I've been experiencing this issue where after I got returned to the Pico Launcher from Animal Crossing Wild World, it just shows an empty launcher (No icons, folders, etc.)

System: New 3DS XL (Sys 11.17.0-50U)
Game: Animal Crossing - Wild World (USA) (Rev 1)
Hotkey used during the game menu
Was returned to a broken Pico Launcher

impeeza · Thursday at 5:09 AM

airosd said:
Hi there! I've been experiencing this issue where after I got returned to the Pico Launcher from Animal Crossing Wild World, it just shows an empty launcher (No icons, folders, etc.)

System: New 3DS XL (Sys 11.17.0-50U)

Game: Animal Crossing - Wild World (USA) (Rev 1)

Hotkey used during the game menu

Was returned to a broken Pico Launcher

View attachment 596086

How do you return from the game to the pico menu?

airosd · Thursday at 5:44 AM

impeeza said:
How do you return from the game to the pico menu?

Using the hotkey L + R + DPad Down + Select

Actually the game can't even load into ingame, only the title screen but it works fine on the LNH pico files though.

impeeza · Thursday at 6:53 AM

airosd said:
Using the hotkey L + R + DPad Down + Select

Actually the game can't even load into ingame, only the title screen but it works fine on the LNH pico files though.

I just noted this is a thread of a no official picomenu. You can open a issue on the developer GitHub

airosd · Thursday at 7:28 AM

impeeza said:
I just noted this is a thread of a no official picomenu. You can open a issue on the developer GitHub

No I mean the behavior doesn't match the official picomenu in that the game isn't playable on this fork (can only load into the title screen but only black screen when loading ingame) and the launcher picture I showed is also on this fork after doing the quick return hotkey

I also can't report the issue on the GitHub repo since it seems to be disabled

VideoGameMore · Thursday at 4:30 PM

airosd said:
Hi there! I've been experiencing this issue where after I got returned to the Pico Launcher from Animal Crossing Wild World, it just shows an empty launcher (No icons, folders, etc.)

System: New 3DS XL (Sys 11.17.0-50U)

Game: Animal Crossing - Wild World (USA) (Rev 1)

Hotkey used during the game menu

Was returned to a broken Pico Launcher

View attachment 596086

Thanks for the feedback! I will add this issue to the list. This is an issue I ran into with a lot of games in development. the free memory must be different for this game so it I'll need to analyze it and see if I can fit the script into the smaller blocks. I am attempting to work through each one of these and fix the ones I can, but if they can not fit I want to be sure you do not run into this issue. Currently the only way to do that is to have the loader ignore the Quick Return command. I'll post here when I get an update!

Post automatically merged: Thursday at 5:01 PM

airosd said:
No I mean the behavior doesn't match the official picomenu in that the game isn't playable on this fork (can only load into the title screen but only black screen when loading ingame) and the launcher picture I showed is also on this fork after doing the quick return hotkey

I also can't report the issue on the GitHub repo since it seems to be disabled

Thanks for the clarification! So Animal Crossing reaches the title screen but black screens when attempting to enter gameplay, and QuickReturn also brings you back to an empty launcher.

I've now enabled bug reporting on our GitHub repository and added a dedicated issue template for QuickReturn.

Could you please submit your findings here so we can properly track and investigate them?

https://github.com/VideoGameMore/pico-loader/issues/new?template=bug_report.yml

If you can confirm that the same game works correctly with the official PicoMenu using the same SD card and ROM, that would be especially helpful in narrowing down the issue.

I really appreciate you testing this and reporting back! We're still working through compatibility issues, and feedback like this helps us identify what needs attention in future builds.

Front-page DSPico QuickReturn — Return to the Pico menu without rebooting

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