GBAtemp's SuperCard SD Review

[Opium]

GBAtemp's Official SuperCard SD Review

Vince989 has reviewed the SuperCard's latest offering, the SuperCard SD. Adding the GBAtemp's range of gba/ds flashkit reviews. Many thanks to Kicktrading for providing the kit for review.

Click HERE to check out the review. Hopfully it should help a lot of readers deciding which flashkit is right for their needs.

GBAtemp will be providing a review of the EFA-Linker II in the very near future and also a mini review of the SuperPass (a passme device for the SuperCard). On the distant horizon there will be a review of the G6 Flash and M3. There are good things to look forward to here at GBAtemp!

 

[Mehdi]

Says nothing about the ds. Maybe vince doesn't have one? But still good review

 

[Sc4rFac3d]

Maybe he doesn't have a Passkey or something.. But I think it supports DS alright...

 

[Vince989]

I do have an NDS, and that's where I did most of my testing (my GBA SP doesn't work with the SuperCard SD, for some reason, and it works perfectly with my dad's GBA SP), but I don't yet have a SuperPass, and can't wait to have one...

Some hints abound...

- Vince989

 

[Slider]

Hi!

Thanx for that great review.It covered pretty much everything I wanted to know bout the Supercard SD. I'm looking forward to buy the SD-Version since I heard it can play DS-Games now, but only could find reviews on the CF-Versions. So thanx for that one

I might hope for a slight update when you get your Superpass

I still got two questions that you probably have an answer for. Heard the Movies played on Supercard sometimes have sync-issues. Is that true? And is the E-Book Reader any good? I'd really like to have a good portable E-Book reader with me. Thanx in advance!

Ah, well maybe somebody even knows an answer to this: I was looking for SD-Cards today and I found that there are different speed types. Think 2MBit/s, 5 MBit/s and 20 MBit/s manufactured by SanDisk. Now, does the SuperCard profit in any way by the faster Cards? I mean is loading actually faster, or might these high-speed Cards even cause problems? Hopes someone can help me here a bit...

 

[Sc4rFac3d]

Ah, well maybe somebody even knows an answer to this: I was looking for SD-Cards today and I found that there are different speed types. Think 2MBit/s, 5 MBit/s and 20 MBit/s manufactured by SanDisk. Now, does the SuperCard profit in any way by the faster Cards? I mean is loading actually faster, or might these high-speed Cards even cause problems? Hopes someone can help me here a bit...

I don't think speed mathers since the card only has one speed, unless they improved the SD version it doesn't really mather what you buy. Might be wrong though, you should best ask the manufacters.

 

[Vince989]

Hi!

Thanx for that great review.It covered pretty much everything I wanted to know bout the Supercard SD. I'm looking forward to buy the SD-Version since I heard it can play DS-Games now, but only could find reviews on the CF-Versions. So thanx for that oneÂ

 I might hope for a slight update when you get your SuperpassÂ

I still got two questions that you probably have an answer for. Heard the Movies played on Supercard sometimes have sync-issues. Is that true? And is the E-Book Reader any good? I'd really like to have a good portable E-Book reader with me. Thanx in advance!

Ah, well maybe somebody even knows an answer to this: I was looking for SD-Cards today and I found that there are different speed types. Think 2MBit/s, 5 MBit/s and 20 MBit/s manufactured by SanDisk. Now, does the SuperCard profit in any way by the faster Cards? I mean is loading actually faster, or might these high-speed Cards even cause problems? Hopes someone can help me here a bit...

Both me and Opium will get a SuperPass, and we will also both add something about it to our reviews. This WILL help it, as NDS support is supposed to be great, with only 4 ROMs not working, with the error most likely coming from the fact that they are more than 256mb. SuperCard's creator, Romman, said this would be fixed somewhere in the future, though...

As for the movies, I have converted a few in high quality, and one really had sync (more like huge lag) issues. However, encoding them at medium quality fixed it immediately, and there isn't much of a difference in visual quality either.

The E-Book Reader is there, it does work, but as I said it's around 40 characters wide only... You'll have to scroll quite often, and the formatting might be messed up as most text files are intended to be larger than that, but besides that it does indeed work well.

And for your last question, as has already been replied, the SuperCard itself reads the card at one fixed speed. Having a faster card won't change anything here. Let's take for instance the loading of GBA games, it needs to read it from the SD card, decompress if needed, then write it to the internal memory, which is what is used once the transfer is done. Even if you the SuperCard could load faster from the SD card, it would just make a bottleneck at the decompression stage, since the decompressor wouldn't run any faster, and the internal memory most likely has a maximum write speed, as it has a maximum read speed (subpar for some games).

Hope this clears the few questions you seemed to have left...

- Vince989

 

[Slider]

It absolutely does

Seems the Supercard really becomes the Card of my choice. Thanx Sc4rFac3d for the quick answer and Vince for the very detailed information. You really made my decision much easier.