Hacking Are all flash carts horible at loading certain games?

[masterz87]

Lego batman 2 takes ~22s from teh time you say start new game, and each time after a cutscene it takes at least 6-7s which is crazy considering the class 4 card is able to do ~10-15MB/s reads. So I'm wondering if any of the other carts have ever updated the fpga to reduce the time it takes for the game to load. This is the first and only game I've ever seen take this long.

On the ds pokemon games took ~2-3s when flying from place to place and that was the worst I had seen but this game is driving me up a wall.

Even with my samsung class 6 card, with a 0.3ms access latency and 25MB/s reads it still takes it 17s, is this some kind of AP crap that makes it take so long?

I notice that it always says the following.

Checking save data(2s pass), writing save data(2s pass), just a picture is shown with the swirling logo thing and it's insane that it'd take this long.

 

[Deleted-19228]

It's probably the game. What you reported for Pokemon is normal on my retail cart.

 

[masterz87]

Well I'm talking about on the 3ds, the pokemon one was the worst I had seen since pokemon, I found someone on youtube with what I guess is a legit cart, and theirs took only 13-14s which is a whole 3-4s faster than mine which confuses me since I know nintendo's a bunch of cheap bastards as they did with the original ds any flash chip above 32mb was ~25% slower than the rest. According to 3dbrew the cart should be able to do up to 16MB/s(about there), and since I know of no speed test for the cart I guess I'm going to wait I guess until some sort of test is done or a tool to get the read speed of the games from the cart itself.

 

[ManBeaPig]

Get a C10 Sandisk. At the end of the day a retail cart holds the game data on a chip on the board (I believe) which is always going to be faster than a micro SD.

 

[masterz87]

Well now as I said this cart is way way faster than anything else, also the class 10 cards, are actually slower than class 6 cards. Because class 4/6 require that speed to be sustained even if the the drive is almost entirely fragmented as in 40%+ fragmentation whereas class 8/10 cards have to sustain that speed with zero percent fragmentation thus the read speed will quickly turn to shit if the drive isn't entirely non-fragmented which it'll become as the drive is used, and wear leveling starts taking it's effects.

 

[cracker]

Get a Samsung EVO. I got some and they are great. If you can't get your hands on one then the Sandisk Extreme Plus (performs better in real-world tests than the Pro) are good too from what I've read.

 

[The Real Jdbye]

Well now as I said this cart is way way faster than anything else, also the class 10 cards, are actually slower than class 6 cards. Because class 4/6 require that speed to be sustained even if the the drive is almost entirely fragmented as in 40%+ fragmentation whereas class 8/10 cards have to sustain that speed with zero percent fragmentation thus the read speed will quickly turn to shit if the drive isn't entirely non-fragmented which it'll become as the drive is used, and wear leveling starts taking it's effects.

I have not come across a single SD card that doesn't perform like shit if there are lots of tiny files or the card is fragmented. That includes old 1GB and 2GB SD/MicroSD cards, class 2, 4, 6 SDHC cards and class 10 SDHC/SDXC cards. All types of storage suffer from this.
It doesn't matter in this case anyway. If a game is more than just a little fragmented the GW cart won't even load it.

 

[masterz87]

I said it wrongly, woops, basically it's class 10 that is defined as meeting it's class 10 rating _only_ if none of the flash cells are already in use. Whereas class 2,4,6 are all required to meet their speed rating even with fragmentation and it does slowly decrease as more and more of the cells are filled but class 10 only guarantees said speed when nothing is even used. Whereas the other ones are required to support it even as they get filled with data,yes once all of the cells are full they all end up with shit performance but class 2,4,6 all slowly degrade performance via a curve whereas 10 instantly starts going down very rapidly.


Also I said it wrong I have a samsung class 6 card, and it is plenty fast enough for most things, but since as I said, class 10 is only guarnteed for no data already on card whereas 6,4,2 is meant to gradually reduce speed but maintain it for awhile,so that's why I chose class 6 card I also like how low the latency on the card is.

Edit:Also when I was using my supercard dstwo I was just using a class 4 card because the ds is only able to do a maximum is only 6MB/s so it was perfectly aok in the way that it was. Also I seriously doubt a class 10 card would help much since I doubt these carts fpga's are fast enough to hand off the data in a quick enough fashion, even though the 3ds carts are suppoed to be able to do ~10MB/s it seems from what I've been reading.

 

[masterz87]

delete me accidently double posted.

 

[Jayro]

I bought a 32GB Samsung EVO (Class 10) and it rocks in my DS cart. Might be a tad overkill, but all my games load and save flawlessly.

 

[masterz87]

4k random it's still doing ~4-5MB/s which is way moer than class 10 is supposed to do, I didn't get the evo ones since I was debating on if I was going to use it in my psp, but I decided against it since my current microsd card that Im using in it is ok at it's seek latency.


Also has anyone else on here ever noticed a 3ds game that makes the 3d light turn off? I hope the game isn't switching backand forth between modes orsome other shit but this is the only game I've seen that does that, sure other games I believe had no 3d never tuned offthe light, and that's the only reason I can come up with for why the thing is so damned slow loading.

 

[Deleted member 333767]

Download citizens of earth eshop game and check out the loading times on that.... Lol indie games.

 

[Osmosis]

*sighs*

Class 10. Fin.

Even the Sky3DS has issues with cycling if lower than class 10. In fact, Sky3DS might even have issues with UHS or SDXC mSD cards.

For Gateway... same for Class, only they're more compatible with SDXC and UHS.

If you don't like the speeds you're getting, upgrade to a Class 10 or higher UHS-1/3. Otherwise the flashcart will fall back to Class rather than take advantage of UHS.

Gateway = doesn't really care, the more the merrier (Guy @ the bar)

Sky3DS = doesn't mind class, but is kind of sketchy about UHS, doesn't really take advantage of more than 32GB, but it can (Girl @ the bar)

DSTwo/R4i = doesn't really care, as long as you have enough room for all your junk (bouncer @ the bar)

 

[masterz87]

the thing is doing 25MB/s reads,that's way more than class 10, plus the latency is way lower than any other flash that I've seen in microsd cards. The cycling issues I'd imagine is more to do with access latency which is the biggest impedement with loading on the psp, since I'm sure it has to pull in quite a few random little files(title id, icon, other such stuff). And the dstwo, I know that it's not going to be doing a whole lot of aything since the bus is l.imtied to 6MB/s for the games and you'll be more limited by the time to start the accesses.

I've looked at the reviews for the class 10/uhs-1 card version of my samsung card and it's random reads/writes are oly a couple of megs faster. Yes reads are way faster, bu since the 3ds I imagine is limited to 15MB/s or so reads I wish there was some better comfirmation for this, but if it is that then anything above that is just wasted speed.

 

[Elusivo]

For me class 10 uhs-1 card made all the difference.

Gateway with a class 4 or 6 (dun remember which but probly it was C4) card my animal crossing rom for instance took minutes to load a save!!! minutes!!

With the class 10 uhs-1 card it takes less than 10sec.

 

[nccom]

Class 10. Fin.

Even the Sky3DS has issues with cycling if lower than class 10.

It doesnt, it depends on actual manufacturer of flash/controller in microsd. And comparing cards by write speed is completely useless, read speed and latency is much more important.

 

[CIAwesome526]

It doesnt, it depends on actual manufacturer of flash/controller in microsd. And comparing cards by write speed is completely useless, read speed and latency is much more important.

Exactly, Rom meanz Read Only Memory, no writing is being done, that happens on the internal sd, which also handles loading saves. So you should also have a good internal If loading saves is slow. But read speeds are much more important for game loading times, because it's read only.

 

[Elusivo]

Card2 games in gw will have its save written and red directly from the "rom" file the meanzing is lost there.

 

[CIAwesome526]

Card2 games in gw will have its save written and red directly from the "rom" file the meanzing is lost there.

Well, rom was never really the right word, but still it's usually treated as rom