From what I've heard, the DS reads faster from the slot 2 then slot 1.
If you played GBA games with a flashcart, you'll notice that it'll have a short loading before launching the game when it loads it into the RAM
Unlike DS games.
That's... kind of the exact opposite of what happens. There are no loading times on the GBA. Code is executed directly from the cartridge itself without being copied into RAM first. This is why the GBA has so little RAM - only 256 KBytes. The DS on the other hand loads chunks of the game into RAM before executing it, made possible by the fact that it has 4 MBytes of RAM. Because the slot-1 cartridge is not directly accessible like slot-2 is, you can't execute programs directly from a DS cartridge.
The "loading time" you're referring to is actually the rom being copied into fast RAM before launch. Because code is executed directly from a GBA cartridge, the game expects lightning-fast response times from the cartridge. SD/miniSD/microSD and CF media are much too slow to handle these response times, and so something faster is needed. In the past, NOR flash was used, which was very slow to write to but very quick to read from. Later however, devices started using RAM instead as a substitute for NOR flash due to the decreased cost and increased convenience. The EZ-Flash 3, 4, and 3in1 (among others) combine both of these methods.
QUOTE(Slyde1052 @ Oct 22 2008, 06:18 PM) I'm sorry to ask, as I'm sure it has before, but is there a way to "trick" the DS into going into the GBA mode after loading a GBA rom from a slot 1 device?