Hacking How R4 card works?

[FixItFilix]

Hi everyone, my ds lite finally arrived yesterday and it is awesome! Although it is used, I really can feel the power when I hold it in my hand. Its great.first of all, please dont smash me if I ask this question. I know about the R4 card quite a long time but I not really sure how actually it works.

Can someone explain to me in detail how actually DS R4 cart work (I have R4 SDHC GOLD Pro 2020). I heard it is only a flash card. But how a flash card need to have a processor and firmware installed in a micrd SD card? I heard some of them have dual core (processor?). Hmm I'm confused. Is my R4 card acting as a new 'brain' for my ds and do all the job including running all the games (because of the processor inside the R4?)? Is it true that after I pluged in my R4 card into my ds for the first time, the original ds firmware is broken?

I played a couple of games like Legend of Kay (very impressive game tbh) and Assassin's creed. I noticed a couple of frame drop when I play these game. Is this because the processor inside the R4 is not powerful enough to run these game?

P.s please forgive me if there are any grammatical error. English is not my language but I try my best to explain. I know that I ask... A lot here but.. I reeeeally want to know.

Thank you

 

[NightScript]

Multi-core flashcarts aren't real. They just put that on the title to bump up some extra $. It's the same flashcarts that ship with kernels that have a timebomb.
The only flashcart that has a CPU inside it is the SuperCard DSTWO.

The way the kernel works is that it redirects any card read/writes from the ROM to the microSD card. It's similar to nds-bootstrap

Is it true that after I pluged in my R4 card into my ds for the first time, the original ds firmware is broken?

No

I noticed a couple of frame drop when I play these game. Is this because the processor inside the R4 is not powerful enough to run these game?

Which card do you have?

 

[FAST6191]

The only flashcart that has a CPU inside it is the SuperCard DSTWO.

The iplayer and ISMM both have CPUs in too, and the DSX technically did.
Also if we are going for technicalities (and ignoring that many SD cards these days have full ARM cores in them, and that many carts have something resembling a processor or something that can process data) then plenty of other carts had some processing extras from their onboard devices (speed boosts to DLDI and whatnot).
For most practical purposes today then yeah the DSTwo is it, though if you find a ISMM there is a port of dingux to it so you do have a handful of emulators not available for the stock DS and flash carts for it.

Back to the OP's questions.
Slowdowns happen from 3 things
1) They were there in the original game
2) You are using a slow SD card. Should not happen much these days but if you are using a 4 gig thing you found in an old ancient phone to test with then don't do that.
3) You enabled a whole bunch of cheats, rest patches, savestates and whatever else and the flash cart can't keep up.

If anything flash carts tend to be faster than the original games -- many of them will remove the anti piracy checks and in doing so actually speed things up noticeably when doing things like scrolling a menu, maybe loading a level or the like. Minor exception for some types of saves in some games where something might be slower, though again most of those are faster (indeed speed of save was used in one case of anti piracy).

As mentioned generally a flash cart works by sitting on the pins of the DS and whatever commands the DS sends it knows how to respond to and fishes the ROM off the SD card (or whatever) instead. There will be a menu to initially select things and most flash carts go one step further and will have cheats, resets, savestates, readers and other fancy features you can reasonably add to DS games by virtue of the way things work.

As for what you want to do to set it up that varies by flash cart. If it is an R4 named thing (r4 was originally one of the first carts to hit big, it then became a byword for flash cart on the DS) then it will usually have a url on the sticker. Hopefully the site is still active as that will tell you what you want to add to it. If note hopefully it is on an archive somewhere. Sometimes the R4 named things will be able to use third party loaders.
Usually for modern stuff there are two main parts
1) The loader part. This contains the graphics you see when you select your ROM and whatever cheats you want, and will also patch homebrew to work.
2) The cart's own firmware. This is the cart's internal operations. Usually updates made to solve problems, bypass blocks from updates on the DSi/3ds and maybe add some functionality. Not every cart will have public/updatable versions of this.
The terms can be changed, mixed up and confused between devices and people writing on the forums.

 

[FixItFilix]

Multi-core flashcarts aren't real. They just put that on the title to bump up some extra $. It's the same flashcarts that ship with kernels that have a timebomb.
The only flashcart that has a CPU inside it is the SuperCard DSTWO.

The way the kernel works is that it redirects any card read/writes from the ROM to the microSD card. It's similar to nds-bootstrap

No


Which card do you have?

does all R4 have time bomb? I have R4 SDHC Gold Pro 2020

--------------------- MERGED ---------------------------

The iplayer and ISMM both have CPUs in too, and the DSX technically did.
Also if we are going for technicalities (and ignoring that many SD cards these days have full ARM cores in them, and that many carts have something resembling a processor or something that can process data) then plenty of other carts had some processing extras from their onboard devices (speed boosts to DLDI and whatnot).
For most practical purposes today then yeah the DSTwo is it, though if you find a ISMM there is a port of dingux to it so you do have a handful of emulators not available for the stock DS and flash carts for it.

Back to the OP's questions.
Slowdowns happen from 3 things
1) They were there in the original game
2) You are using a slow SD card. Should not happen much these days but if you are using a 4 gig thing you found in an old ancient phone to test with then don't do that.
3) You enabled a whole bunch of cheats, rest patches, savestates and whatever else and the flash cart can't keep up.

If anything flash carts tend to be faster than the original games -- many of them will remove the anti piracy checks and in doing so actually speed things up noticeably when doing things like scrolling a menu, maybe loading a level or the like. Minor exception for some types of saves in some games where something might be slower, though again most of those are faster (indeed speed of save was used in one case of anti piracy).

As mentioned generally a flash cart works by sitting on the pins of the DS and whatever commands the DS sends it knows how to respond to and fishes the ROM off the SD card (or whatever) instead. There will be a menu to initially select things and most flash carts go one step further and will have cheats, resets, savestates, readers and other fancy features you can reasonably add to DS games by virtue of the way things work.

As for what you want to do to set it up that varies by flash cart. If it is an R4 named thing (r4 was originally one of the first carts to hit big, it then became a byword for flash cart on the DS) then it will usually have a url on the sticker. Hopefully the site is still active as that will tell you what you want to add to it. If note hopefully it is on an archive somewhere. Sometimes the R4 named things will be able to use third party loaders.
Usually for modern stuff there are two main parts
1) The loader part. This contains the graphics you see when you select your ROM and whatever cheats you want, and will also patch homebrew to work.
2) The cart's own firmware. This is the cart's internal operations. Usually updates made to solve problems, bypass blocks from updates on the DSi/3ds and maybe add some functionality. Not every cart will have public/updatable versions of this.
The terms can be changed, mixed up and confused between devices and people writing on the forums.

I see.. But how about an emulator running on the R4 cart? I saw people put various emulator software (genesis and sms is there too) inside the micro sd card together with ROM file. How it works? Isn't emulator software need to have a proper OS to run ROMS? Is the emulator running inside an R4 and the ds is just acting as screen and controller?

 

[FAST6191]

I see.. But how about an emulator running on the R4 cart? I saw people put various emulator software (genesis and sms is there too) inside the micro sd card together with ROM file. How it works? Isn't emulator software need to have a proper OS to run ROMS? Is the emulator running inside an R4 and the ds is just acting as screen and controller?

If it is not a DSTwo, ISMM or iplayer exclusive then it is just a piece of DS code. DS homebrew has the option to reach out and grab files from the SD cards (or NAND or whatever) in DS flash carts via a thing called DLDI that flash cart makers all integrate into their DS slot carts at least.
At that point it is just code running on the DS' own processors.

A proper OS is not needed at all. All an operating system does on a computer is provide a way to do a lot of common tasks, if you are willing to handle those tasks (or more likely get a library to handle them) then you can do it all yourself. Unlike a PC as well every DS is the same (it is not like you end up with infinite combinations of hardware like a PC, it is all still a DS) so you don't have to account for that, your users don't need to manage files and only care that the game loads and the game saves, and frankly there is very little to the DS either (some buttons, a touch screen, fairly basic audio as these things go, a few nice extras and that is about it -- http://problemkaputt.de/gbatek.htm if you are curious about the hardware).
Having a full fat OS is nice to have for hackers and homebrew makers as it will do some of the handling, and if you hack the OS then you can usually inject whatever cheats or hacks you like into the games and run them from anything you want as well (USB, SD, internal memory...), and also make some of the cheats and hacks in the first place. For a system without that you are left having to hack each game individually to do a lot of that and that is either very annoying or borderline impossible (think many years of effort from a team of talented coders).

The DSTwo, ISMM and iplayer exclusive stuff usually runs entirely on the flash cart CPU (you can run things on both the internal CPU and DS' CPUs but synchronising them is a nightmare) and just kicks back audio-video output and takes in button presses. However on the DS they are very much the exception, indeed it is only the various third party "play ? on *" type devices that allow you to play game cartridges from one console on another that do that anywhere else.

 

[NightScript]

does all R4 have time bomb? I have R4 SDHC Gold Pro 2020

No. Mainly, the ones with years in them.

- R4i SDHC 3DS B9S
- R4i SDHC 3DS RTS
- R4i SDHC Dual-Core 2016-20XX
- R4i SDHC Gold Pro 2016-20XX
- R4i SDHC RTS Lite 2016-20XX
- R4i SDHC 3DS EU

Source: DeadSkullzJr

 

[FixItFilix]

No. Mainly, the ones with years in them.

- R4i SDHC 3DS B9S
- R4i SDHC 3DS RTS
- R4i SDHC Dual-Core 2016-20XX
- R4i SDHC Gold Pro 2016-20XX
- R4i SDHC RTS Lite 2016-20XX
- R4i SDHC 3DS EU

Source: DeadSkullzJr

Oh I see.. Thanks

--------------------- MERGED ---------------------------

If it is not a DSTwo, ISMM or iplayer exclusive then it is just a piece of DS code. DS homebrew has the option to reach out and grab files from the SD cards (or NAND or whatever) in DS flash carts via a thing called DLDI that flash cart makers all integrate into their DS slot carts at least.
At that point it is just code running on the DS' own processors.

A proper OS is not needed at all. All an operating system does on a computer is provide a way to do a lot of common tasks, if you are willing to handle those tasks (or more likely get a library to handle them) then you can do it all yourself. Unlike a PC as well every DS is the same (it is not like you end up with infinite combinations of hardware like a PC, it is all still a DS) so you don't have to account for that, your users don't need to manage files and only care that the game loads and the game saves, and frankly there is very little to the DS either (some buttons, a touch screen, fairly basic audio as these things go, a few nice extras and that is about it -- if you are curious about the hardware).
Having a full fat OS is nice to have for hackers and homebrew makers as it will do some of the handling, and if you hack the OS then you can usually inject whatever cheats or hacks you like into the games and run them from anything you want as well (USB, SD, internal memory...), and also make some of the cheats and hacks in the first place. For a system without that you are left having to hack each game individually to do a lot of that and that is either very annoying or borderline impossible (think many years of effort from a team of talented coders).

The DSTwo, ISMM and iplayer exclusive stuff usually runs entirely on the flash cart CPU (you can run things on both the internal CPU and DS' CPUs but synchronising them is a nightmare) and just kicks back audio-video output and takes in button presses. However on the DS they are very much the exception, indeed it is only the various third party "play ? on *" type devices that allow you to play game cartridges from one console on another that do that anywhere else.

Thanks for explainin. So the emulator program (Lets say genesis) we put inside the micro sd card just take the ROM and tell the ds cpu how to run it right. Ok now I understand
Sorry I have to delete the link, if not I cant reply