Hardware Anybody ever heard of N-Cards?

Apache Thunder

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Yeah they are soldered on and so far every N-Card/N-Card clone had glued together shells. Some of the cheaper clones were easier to pull part. Though I will say the ExpressCard shells are held together almost as well as retail shells. But I'm sure you shouldn't have to worry too much about that. It appears they might actually be some type of super cap as they are not diode protected and the voltage goes up when the card is powered up so they seem to be rechargeable. Just having the card used in a console for a few hours a month is probably enough to keep them from going bad if you plan to not use them very often. ;)
 
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Apache Thunder

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Yeah the 16g carts (16g == 2GB) are the largest capacity they ever made for these carts. The smaller capacity cards had differing save chip sizes too but I've only ever seen 16g carts use the largest size they made which was around 512KB I believe which I think is 1mbit. Cart works by storing current game's save in sram until next reboot. Works in a manner similar to some GBA flashcarts in that regard. Because of this N-Card doesn't need save patches for the most part either. It's why it's compatibility is as good as it is despite not receiving software updates for the past 16+. You might have to manually select a save type in xmenu for some games but after that it remembers the save types you set so it more or less just works. :D

It does use a 20KB DLDI file though so using certain homebrew can be a hassle. Some newer stuff like TwilightMenu can't run on N-Card because of the large DLDI size. Maybe they could update it to support 32KB DLDI standard if they can find the memory space for it but currently that's the main reason you can't run Twilight on it.

I was able to run Twilight in read only mode though via a custom DLDI driver I wrote though. It uses direct card reads to read a fat image appended to a DS rom. Works in a manner similar to the old FCSR driver for slot-2 cards but read only. Twilight is able to run most games like this but the down side is it's read only so I could only set it up to play a single game since modern versions of Twilight depend on ini file to tell nds-bootstrap what game to play. This also means saves are read only as a result as well. FastVideoDS however runs great with this driver. I can practically create single rom movie files if I want because of this. :D

This all works because even for homebrew, N-Card remaps retail B7 card reads to read the space dedicated to the DS rom booted so it appears as if the cart contains that rom as it's main rom. This is why it doesn't need to patch retail games so the compatibility is as good as it is. Normally not possible on modern carts because of MicroSD interface not allowing this due to timing constraints. But this is not the case with nand base cart like this so it could get away with doing that. :D

By the way they are still usable if you only have DSi or 3DS (so long as they are soft modded that is). Some time ago I wrote a modified build of GodMode9i called GodMode9Nrio (NRIO being the internal name for it's DLDI) that allows transferring files to/from an N-Card to a DSi SD card. Works on 3DS too last I checked though N-Card doesn't show up on 3DS Home Menu so you have to boot it via NTR Launcher. ;)
 
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4d1xlaan

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I don't think I'll get one, I considered it but really it would only collect dust, even though this is a cool novelty and playing games on it instead of anything else would be kinda cool. but it's not much more than a novelty when I have plenty of microsd-based flashcarts that run everything just fine already. now if the slot-2 adapter could also play gba games then I'd have been a lot more tempted lol

but I think as it is, it's probably better if I leave them to people who actually will appreciate it properly and would actually use them

now though if I could find an acekard rpg... now that's a novelty I would 100% spend money on, and it would replace all my other carts too tbh so it would actually be used, and not just sit there looking pretty
 

Apache Thunder

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Well you can use the USB adapter to turn your DS into a mouse pad or gamepad for PC stuff. There was a couple homebrew examples the N-Card devs released back in the day. I even modernized them to compile on modern libnds:

https://github.com/ApacheThunder/nCard_USB_Examples

More interesting things could have been done with this like an open source version of udisk (the program used to make N-Card show up as flash disk on PC) that uses DLDI to support any possible flashcart and other more exotic things could have been done but as far as I can tell no one has done anything with the USB API N-Card devs made. :(

And yeah you can't play GBA games on the USB cart. It has no ram or anything. It's strictly an interface card and that's it.

The mouse pad/game pad homebrew however does not require an N-Card to use. Just need the slot-2 card. Only uDisk was locked to N-Cards because of how that one operated.
 
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Apache Thunder

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Got a Yoshi Game case I found on eBay for around $31. Mainly got it because it included a DS Linker and my current one is bricked so nice to have a working one again. :D

The interesting bit with this DS Linker is that it is in pink shell like my ExpressCards. (though photos don't really show that very well). Seems to have same PCB too with the same markings near the contacts. The bricked DS Linker seems to be a slightly different PCB revision and it's shell is white unlike this one. The shell for the first DS LInker I have is pretty low quality too so while not a fan of the pink shell color this one seems to at least be a better quality one at least. :P

It's on an ancient version of xmenu too. 1.22N. I would guess the person who previously owned this one never updated it.

... Not sure what I'm gonna do with the 2 Yoshi games though. :P

DS LInker.jpgDS Linker 2.jpgDSLinker3.jpgYoshiCase.jpgYoshiCase2.jpg
 
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We are currently working on finding button combinations that aren't yet documented elsewhere.

Here is what we got so far. (shoutout to Apache Thunder for findings)

• SELECT+START – Format cart menu.
• L+R+SELECT – SRAM test screen; slot-2 device MUST be present. If SRAM data is correct, then it proceeds to the USB menu.
• SELECT – Skips the USB mounting function, as well as the menu; works if slot-2 card is inserted.
• L+R+A+B+X+Y – Unknown, at the time of writing. Delays loading of uDisk unless you release the buttons.
 
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Apache Thunder

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Apache Thunder

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I thought N-cards didn't need batteries! :mellow:
Where did you read they didn't? The batteries are recharcheable so usually it's not an issue but N-Cards are almost 20 years old. (they will start turning 20 around 2027. :P ) so no surprise there's quiet a few old ones with dead/dying batteries that don't charge anymore.
 
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Where did you read they didn't? The batteries are recharcheable so usually it's not an issue but N-Cards are almost 20 years old. (they will start turning 20 around 2027. :P ) so no surprise there's quiet a few old ones with dead/dying batteries that don't charge anymore.

I probably think that because I thought NAND it was some kind of magic memory. XD
Like NAND dsi memory?
 

Apache Thunder

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I probably think that because I thought NAND it was some kind of magic memory. XD
Like NAND dsi memory?
Oh. The battery is just for game saves. That's because it isn't able to write game saves to nand while the game is running. This is due to the kernel files being very simple in design and not patching games. Relies on hardware level card read redirects. (basically just remaps nand blocks to the areas B7 retail card read command expects them to be).

Game saves are written to an SRAM chip. the ASIC chip on the cart emulates the SPI commands and such. Any time a game saves, it goes to that chip.

Then on reboot XMenu (the kernel menu for this cart) reads game save from sram chip back onto nand to the SAV file for that game.

This is where the battery comes into play. Because it uses SRAM it needs a battery. That way if someone plays a game and turns the console off when they are done, the save isn't lost before xmenu had a chance to write it back to nand on reboot.

This is why N-Cards require a battery.
 

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Tarmfot

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Oh. The battery is just for game saves. That's because it isn't able to write game saves to nand while the game is running. This is due to the kernel files being very simple in design and not patching games. Relies on hardware level card read redirects. (basically just remaps nand blocks to the areas B7 retail card read command expects them to be).

Game saves are written to an SRAM chip. the ASIC chip on the cart emulates the SPI commands and such. Any time a game saves, it goes to that chip.

Then on reboot XMenu (the kernel menu for this cart) reads game save from sram chip back onto nand to the SAV file for that game.

This is where the battery comes into play. Because it uses SRAM it needs a battery. That way if someone plays a game and turns the console off when they are done, the save isn't lost before xmenu had a chance to write it back to nand on reboot.

This is why N-Cards require a battery.
Damn, thanks for such a good explanation.
 

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Been a bit since you've reported back. Any progress testing the G6 Dongle with things?

Also curious if G6 operates in a manner similar to N-Card. Is it able to boot newer SDK5 stuff like the N-Card can?
I somehow missed this message. More than half a year later I'm reporting back with good news! The card is working correctly with the dongle.

In the process of getting it to work I unfortunately formatted the card, meaning the original contents are gone. Fortunately it had kernel 3.9, which is backed up in linFox Domain under M3/G6 DS Real and M3i Zero, so I don't think anything relevant was lost.

I'll be doing more tests and documenting the card's features, starting with the game tests. You also mentioned a ROM dump, how do you suggest I go about that? Or is it not needed anymore now that the card is formatted?

Some useful links related to the card:
- linFox Domain | M3/G6 DS Real and M3i Zero
- Official website archive
 
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Apache Thunder

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Rom dump shouldn't be impacted by if you formatted it or not. You should be able to use GodMode9i to rom dump the cart.

I found someone else who has this card recently and they were able to test my idea on if retail rom loading worked in similar way to N-Card...turns out it doesn't so SDK5 game support might be ... not good.

The DLDI was pretty slow too from what I've heard.
 
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Been playing around with the G6 Real for a bit.

Getting the card to work with the reader is pretty finnicky, so although it's really slow I'll likely be using nrio-usb-disk to play around with this card going forward.

I tried launching a dump of Pokémon Black. It gets to the titlescreen but starting a new save causes a crash (game locks up). Also tried to launch GodMode9i, which failed and created a corrupted save file. I guess this is related to what @Janni9009 said on Discord regarding the game code needing to be ####. Reformatted the card to delete it.

For the card features, it can autolaunch even when the DS is not configured to do so. It can be changed from within the card settings (which is super bare bones). The PDA is a fun gimmick, though the archival situation in linFox is weird. The 1.1 Beta is in Chinese so I went to downgrade to 1.0, but that's actually the 1.1 English Beta. There's some missing apps in the English release (Chinese->English dictionary and viceversa). I'll reach out to see if we can get it fixed.

Regarding Slot-2 shennanigans, I'm able to boot the slot-2 card from the dedicated menu (tested with a Supercard SD and an Omega DE), but booting GBA games seems to specifically look for the G6 lite (time to buy the M3 I have saved?).

Here's a GDrive with some images and the ROM and metadata dumps made with GodMode9i from TwilightMenu++. I'm curious, how would I go about adding support for mounting this card in GodMode9i?
 
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