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Hacking Bigger cards = less battery?

[DSpico] Pico Launcher Enhanced, and PicoDex, a browser tool for the SD card

rasalopa · 2026-08-07T14:17:06+00:00

Hi everyone. I have been working on a few things for the DSpico for the last weeks and I wanted to share them here. Pico Launcher Enhanced is my fork of Pico Launcher. It keeps everything the original does and adds: Favorites (press X) and completed marks (hold X), with filters in the app bar Play time, launch count and last played date per game A recently played panel and a statistics screen (START) Game deletion from the launcher, with confirmation Brightness control for the DS Lite backlight Per folder background music, and night variants for theme backgrounds Game count of the current folder on the top screen, and random launch with SELECT The last release was mostly bug fixes. The worst one: the favorites filter could come up completely empty. Marks were looked up by the game internal code first, so on a renamed rom the top screen found the heart but the browser filter, which only sees file names, could not, and the game just vanished from the list. A user reported it and sent me his gamedata.json, that file is what let me find it. Saving is also atomic now, before that a power loss in the middle could leave you with an empty file and no favorites at all. Install is the same as the original, rename LAUNCHER.nds to _picoboot.nds in the root of your SD card. Your existing gamedata.json carries over. https://github.com/rasalopa/pico-launcher-enhanced PicoDex is a browser tool for the SD card. No install and no backend, you open the card and it manages covers, folder icons and file associations. It also tells you which Pico Loader release your card is running, and warns you when the files in _pico did not all come from the same one, which happens if you update by copying only the files you think changed. And for a retail nds game it shows what the loader will do at boot, if an anti piracy fix matches your exact rom revision, the save type and size, and any game patch. Chromium only sorry (Chrome, Edge, Brave, Opera). https://rasalopa.github.io/picodex/ The board LEDs, the DSpico board has two status leds that the firmware leaves dark. I made a firmware fork that uses them, blue for SD card activity and red when the firmware cannot start an SD transfer it needs, which are the places where it already freezes with no visible sign. Here it is reading, and then saving: This one needs compiling the firmware yourself, so I also sent it upstream as a pull request with the feature behind a build flag that is off by default. If it gets merged it would be there for everyone without a custom build. https://github.com/LNH-team/dspico-firmware/pull/26 Everything is open source. Thanks to the LNH team for the DSpico and for making all of this possible in the first place. If something is broken or you want something, issues are the fastest way to reach me.

Thread starter racingfreak92
Start date Dec 22, 2008
Views 1,779
Replies 5

racingfreak92

Member

Newcomer

Level 1

Dec 22, 2008

Im gonna buy a new micro sdhc card and dont know if im gonna get a 4gb or 8gb. I heard that SDHC cards give less battery life than normal SD cards. So do larger capacity SDHC cards give less battery life?

DeMoN

GBAtemp Guru

Member

Level 12

Dec 23, 2008

Possibly, but that difference will be negligible unlike the difference between HC and non-HC.

racingfreak92

Member

Newcomer

Level 1

Dec 23, 2008

how big of a drop should i expect with HC?

TraumaHoundNDS

Well-Known Member

Member

Level 1

Dec 23, 2008

Not that I've noticed with my 8GB card. Granted, I don't sit and play for hours on end but I haven't noticed anything that's made me think I'm getting less playtime between charges.

Narin

The Cheat Master, kupo!

Former Staff

Level 7

Dec 23, 2008

It depends on the size and the brand of the flashcard. Larger card sizes mean more energy consumption, also build quality is also taken into account. Theres others factors as well like the flashcart you are using, the back light setting and sound volume as well. Though on average, you can see as much as a 1-3 hour drop depending on the card.