What I did was dual-boot the YSmenu and the official 1.18....I did this to hook up some kids I know who only have an R4 so they could still play whatever games they want since they have no clue about ARM7 fixing.
Initially, you'll boot the 1.18 firmware. But set up the YSmenu (there's a guide on how to set up YSmenu here on GBAtemp) and decrypt the _DS_MENU.DAT from the YSmenu loader and rename it _DS_MSHL.NDS....you can just rename the original _DS_MSHL.NDS from the R4 loader to simply Moonshell.nds and just load it through YSmenu since the R4's Moonshell icon will now be used for loading YSmenu. So when a game doesn't work in the 1.18 loader, you can reboot the R4 and select the middle icon to boot the YSmenu loader and try the game that way. Between the two loaders, one of them should play the problem game and you'll still retain all of the functionality you had with only the 1.18 loader.
The biggest drawback is that having 2 separate loaders, plus themes for the R4 loader and 2 separate cheat files (cheat.dat and usrcheat.dat in two separate folders) comes to about 32 megs total, which can be rough if you like to stuff your R4 full of games and other media, seeing as how you're limited to only 2gigs on an R4.
I don't know if there are any games that don't work on BOTH loaders, but it's an option to try if you don't want to use ARM7 fixes all the time....or at least it could cut down on the amount of games that you would need to do the ARM7 fix on.
