Hacking ACEKARD first review worldwide

FifthE1ement

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This sounds great! I translated the review and the user seems to think this is the best slot 1 flashcart that will be on the market (until sc and m3 join in). I think everyone goes nuts about skinable os with icons, blah, blah, blah... WHO CARES!? You should be spending more than a few seconds in the menu anyway? I don't understand what everyone is doing in the menu for hours? The DS-X is nice but this is much better (from impressions)!

FIfthE1ement
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trebus

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Ok, using Babelfish I have grasped what the card does and will summarise it for you guys.

Ok, the chinese review is only the first impressions.
Acekard is made by a new company with no Gba experiences at all. It is a new start up company but they are really nice people who are working as hard as they can to support everything.

Acekard is the same size as the DS cart and the Trans-Flash is front loaded like the supercard lite and is also spring loaded. An important feature is that you do not need to flash your DS at all! A lot of people are deterred by the flashing process and is afraid that it may do something bad to the system and even brick it but with the build in passme you do not need to flash it at all.

Also it supports all flashcarts except the EZFLASH, also you can use the Acekard to play DS download games with no problems at all unlike the other Cart solutions. (unsure of this part)

Also, it advertises a clean rom system whereby you just copy and paste. Originally systems you need a game manager to convert a game to play on it but because it's a FAT system it gives an amount of lag unless you use highspeed cards. Rather than going around the FAT system the AceKard team devised a new file system format called AKFS. Which is revolutionary in itself as AKFS ahs no lags or problems no matter what the card you are using and they found FAT to be too slow and would bring many problems too. You need the game manager to format it into AKFS and to transfer the firmware but after that you just cut and paste.

To demonstrate how versatile the system is, it has been tested with every game like Animal Crossing, Pokemon Dash, Ultimate Spiderman, Castlevania and they all played perfectly. Even more impressive is that the Acekard team has not upgraded the firmware in over a month and it can still play the latest games. AceKard team has said unless Nintendo changes all the NDS games drastically, they would have no problem play any and all backups with no problems at all.

But The Acekard does have problems, which is the strengh and the weakness as well. AKFS give a better performance for backups but is not able to run FAT file programs which is used by every homebrew. Also it does not seem like someone could put in Mp3s and documents in the card for now. The Acekard team is currently working on a solution for the homebrew situation and I have trust that they would do well as AceKard seems so sincere and honest. They are now working so that FAT can be used on the AKFS file format. Also they are currently working on a Mac program for the manager which would be complete by the time the AceKard is out in the market.

For now, Acekard is under development and still in the prototype stages so these issues with it may be solved when it is released. So far these are the strengths and the faults of the Acekard as of now until the end of October when they roll out the AceKard at a cost of $45.

Edit:
When inserting a Transflash it sets it depending on the brand so that it can read it at full speed. So even if you have a cheap kingston or something there would be no lags at all in castlevania or something.

Kingmax: 4
PNY 1G: 3
Kingston 1G: 3
Sandisk entire series: 13

It also seems like they are making it very easy to skin the OS and also allows you to write homebrew using it as far I can I can understand. Officially they have not updated since september 23 the game manager and firmware and even with that they are able to play clean roms with no problems even with the latest games. So I guess that leaves them more time and is more free to work on improvements rather than making games compatible all the time like Supercard,M3 and so on.
 

muggsy

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Th fact that the DS-X is a standard usb storage device is the only reason I need. It means its platform independent and I can use it whether I'm booted into Linux or Windows. Also means don't have to worry about running any software thru wine etc. As long as firmware upgrades are just copying files to the DS-X and running them from there.

the Acekard has some great features.. and I'm sure it will either sell a lot.. or inspire a lot of rip offs....

Its great to see some very competitive products coming to the market
 

tama_mog

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I can read chinese, and from everything I've read so far I am impressed. I am a tad unconvinced of the custom file system structure that I see....that can lead to problems if they aren't careful in developing the allocation structure. But this looks like something I'll be purchasing to tinker with if nothing else.
 

neojei

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I can't wait for this. Been holding out on a flashcart for so long because new ones keep getting announced. Wanted DS-Link, but no passme on it, DS-X is the one I really want, but it costs the same amount for a new DS Lite, no way I'm getting that, though its friggin pretty. This is what I'll settle for. Hopefully reviews are good.
 

Paralel

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Having to use software in order to load content is a killer for me.

I'm only interested in something that is mass storage compliant or just needs to have the micro SD card inserted into it with the roms dumped on it. This will never be possible because it uses some proprietary file system that isn't recognized by any OS.
 

pte

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But even the DSX has some cons:

You probably have to update the firmware so that new games and such work and you also have to trim the roms if you want to save at least some space. On a 512MB card that matters a lot on some occasions. If the DSX team got around firmware updates so that every game works even without any firmware updates in the future as well then it's like they said. But if it patches them while the .nds while is being ran it uses a same method as everyone else but in a new way. Dunno, I am no coder or understand the DS well enough.
 

neojei

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Yeah that proprietary file system makes me feel weary of this product. I'll wait for a review, then I'll buy 10. Lol. Honestly I hope this cart works well, and supports the homebrew I'd like to use.
 

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