Hardware Anybody ever heard of N-Cards?

[SylverReZ]

Before the R4 and M3 DS days were very common, there was something called an "N-Card", created by a Chinese company called DSGBA, which specialises in manufacturing GBA and DS flashcards for the market. A number of clones of the N-Card have come out of this, such as the Ultra FlashPass EX, the DS Fire Link, the DS Linker, and the Sunny Flash, albeit with their own unique features and updates. These cartridges don't contain a slot for a microSD or full-size SD card; rather, they comprise a single NAND flash (either Hynix or Samsung, depending on the brand of card) that can be modified with the use of a special adapter which taps into the GBA slot on the DS.

They come in different capacities, from 1GBit up to a 16GBit card; we're talking gigabits of storage. In no way, shape, or form should this be confused with gigabytes. A 1GBit card holds up to 125MB, which is merely for smaller games for the casual player, whereas a 16GBit card could hold 2GB for much larger games around 256MB or 512MB, such as Rhythm Paradise/Heaven or Pokemon HeartGold.

Here's a photo of the package contents:

Utilities (thank you @Apache Thunder for helping out):
GodMode9NRIO (fork to mount N-Card filesystem to explore its contents): https://github.com/ApacheThunder/GodMode9Nrio
nrioTool (tool to dump hidden SRL sections on the NAND for reverse engineering/preservation purposes): https://github.com/ApacheThunder/nrioTool

Firmware:
An archive containing dozens of useful resources for various N-Card clones: https://github.com/m4x10187/fire-card-archive

Do you have an N-Card (original/clone) or you would like to know how you can make it useful for future use? Or do you have a unknown flashcard and would like to know if its one of these or similar?

Feel free to share your thoughts and questions here. I would be happy to help out!

 

[Apache Thunder]

I recently updated nrioTool to 1.0 release build:

https://github.com/ApacheThunder/nrioTool/releases/tag/1.0

I would encourage those who have 8gigabit and smaller cards to do a full sector dump of their cart via DS/DS Lite connected to PC (Win32DiskImager or HxD can be used to do this). I would like to obtain images of those cards so I can add support for writing default fat images for them. Currently nrioTool can only support 16g carts for doing a default fat image restore.

 

[SylverReZ]

I recently updated nrioTool to 1.0 release build:

https://github.com/ApacheThunder/nrioTool/releases/tag/1.0

I would encourage those who have 8gigabit and smaller cards to do a full sector dump of their cart via DS/DS Lite connected to PC (Win32DiskImager or HxD can be used to do this). I would like to obtain images of those cards so I can add support for writing default fat images for them. Currently nrioTool can only support 16g carts for doing a default fat image restore.

I am currently obtaining card dumps as well. If you have any, let me know.

 

[Apache Thunder]

Just got a ExpressCard (N-Card clone) today and the firmware on this thing is positively ancient. Probably has a version of uDisk that predates the era of it being called uDisk.

Anyways here's some photos.



Some things I noticed via initial nrioTool dump attempts. The "udisk section" doesn't appear to exist. Blank data exists at the offset it would normally be located at. Stage2 SRL still exists and is probably something even the oldest cards have. It's possible the "USB Disk Program" is in the stage2 SRL instead. Though I did notice that like the updated DSLinker the stage2 SRL is around 84KB in size. The default filesystem appears to contain no xmenu at all and has an old copy of DSOrganize. The USB writer is identical to the DS LInker as expected and confirmed the DS LInker USB device works for this card.

 

[SylverReZ]

Some things I noticed via initial nrioTool dump attempts. The "udisk section" doesn't appear to exist. Blank data exists at the offset it would normally be located at. Stage2 SRL still exists and is probably something even the oldest cards have. It's possible the "USB Disk Program" is in the stage2 SRL instead. Though I did notice that like the updated DSLinker the stage2 SRL is around 84KB in size. The default filesystem appears to contain no xmenu at all and has an old copy of DSOrganize. The USB writer is identical to the DS LInker as expected and confirmed the DS LInker USB device works for this card.

The USB writer for your ExpressCard and DS Linker is also the same as my DS Fire Link. One thing I notice with your adapter is that the pin contacts are slightly thicker for better continuity. I suppose the slot-1 cards are almost the same too being that they're both clones of the N-Card.

 

[Disturbo]

Well this is convenient! I was just looking at N-Card posts cause I'm trying to find out if it has any way of running GBA games (it seems it doesn't, maybe one of you can confirm?) and I may as well post all the dumps of my 1GB N-Card.




At the beginning of this year the card was dead, meaning I had to revive it using v2.55 firmware so unfortunately it's nothing new on that front. Same for the uDisk version, it's 1.45, but hopefully the dumps (Google Drive) can be useful for archival of the 1GB version.

 

[Apache Thunder]

Yeah the slot2 devices are built only for USB communication and can't be used as memory expansion or as GBA rom.

 

[Disturbo]

Ah well that's unfortunate! Time to test GBARunner3 then.

Forgot to ask, was the 1GB dump of any use?

 

[SylverReZ]

Well this is convenient! I was just looking at N-Card posts cause I'm trying to find out if it has any way of running GBA games (it seems it doesn't, maybe one of you can confirm?) and I may as well post all the dumps of my 1GB N-Card.

View attachment 404112
View attachment 404113 View attachment 404114

At the beginning of this year the card was dead, meaning I had to revive it using v2.55 firmware so unfortunately it's nothing new on that front. Same for the uDisk version, it's 1.45, but hopefully the dumps (snip) can be useful for archival of the 1GB version.

I've added your N-Card 1GB/8GBit dump onto the Fire Card archive repository. I had to, however, fully format the FAT image and re-build the first sector from scratch. As even if you did a quick format or removed one or more files, copyrighted ROMs are still present in the disk image via a hex editor. (please fix this, as its against GBAtemp's TOS).

I have extracted xMenu and the uDisk updater from the image and placed it into a separate directory called "recovered".

https://github.com/m4x10187/fire-card-archive/commit/ced86434054e47dcca8d4e90efd25cc92f88d688

Post automatically merged: Nov 19, 2023

A discovery found so far, thanks to @Disturbo. It seems like the N-Cards have the proper NAND size instead of gigabits now that we have an image dump.

 

[SylverReZ]

N-Cards now have a dedicated page over at ConsoleMods wiki.
https://consolemods.org/wiki/NDS:N-Card

 

[Jayro]

So is it like some kind of passme device then? I never understood the point of those things, I came into the NDS scene when that stuff was no longer needed.

 

[Trevor_2012]

Does the gba slot usb adapter work with the real G6 to copy the kernel?

 

[ghjfdtg]

So is it like some kind of passme device then? I never understood the point of those things, I came into the NDS scene when that stuff was no longer needed.

As i understand this card has the flash storage builtin. The advantage i can see is that games literally don't need any patches at all as long as the card emulates the ROM protocol of a genuine game properly. No patches means 100% compatibility (except maybe for games with infrared or Bluetooth). All modern flashcards need patches because the microSD doesn't have low enough latency. Direct NAND flash access does have low enough latency.

 

[SylverReZ]

Does the gba slot usb adapter work with the real G6 to copy the kernel?

Nope, only the N-Cards. The adapter acts as a USB interface to mount the card as a removal disk drive.

 

[Trevor_2012]

But the G6 uses internal flash memory.

 

[Apache Thunder]

But the G6 uses internal flash memory.

Doesn't matter. If the G6 doesn't respond to the same card commands N-Cards do, uDisk (NDS app required to use the USB adapter) won't know how to access it properly. You'll more then likely just get unknown flash when you try and boot udisk on it if the G6 isn't a N-Card clone. You can still use the USB slot 2 device for certain homebrew apps like the DS Mouse and DSPad example apps via any flashcard but udisk specifically requires N-Card hardware that all the n-card clones use.

The only way you'll be able to transfer files and such to unsupported cards via the slot2 device is if you program your own homebrew app. You are more then welcome to try:

https://github.com/ApacheThunder/nCard_USB_Examples

I converted the open sourced DS Pad/Mouse example apps the N-Card devs made to modern devkitpro and in theory if you could figure out how to use their USB APi, you can program it to use standard DLDI driver instead of their hard-coded card access code to make it work for other flashcarts. Good luck with that.

 

[Trevor_2012]

The real g6 is a useless flashcard without the usb reader, but it was worth it, thanks.

 

[SylverReZ]

nrioTool got a new Christmas update.
https://github.com/ApacheThunder/nrioTool/releases/tag/1.5c

 

[FR0ZN]

Are these old carts emulating the cartridge protocol (like Sky3DS+ or Mig Switch)?
Or did all NDS carts work after the same principal like they do today?

 

[Apache Thunder]

All the DS flashcarts emulate some portion of the slot-1 protocol like the blowfish encryption and such. However most modern flashcarts use MicroSD cards these days so they have to patch games to handle the extra steps required to handle MicroSD access.

However N-Card is unique in that it doesn't patch the games at all and instead replicates the rom reads on the hardware level. It can get away with this because it's a nand based flashcart and nand is fast enough and simple enough to handle things without breaking important timings, etc.