I would say the biggest feature of the RPG is being the only open source solution on the market. Now, this is a mixed blessing, as I think Lynx over at NDShb summed it up best in his prophetic review:
QUOTE said:
Open Source. I'm still not sure if this is a good thing or bad. Half of me says, "YEAH!" we can do whatever we want with the card.. As people have suggested, the USB port might make a great debug interface. The other half of me says "BOOH!" as this leaves them the ability to drop support of the device. If they release the initial firmware, and "Joe" comes along and releases a "better" firmware, everyone switches to Joe's firmware. Now, this makes Joe the maintainer of the firmware for this device. So, if something isn't working, you have to talk to Joe, as it's his firmware. Or, go back to the original firmware that might not have the features you like.
And this is precisely where we find ourselves today, with individuals like the AIO team responsible for the real upkeep of the loader software while AK does very little other than update only if the occassional game fails to work. If you want features like cheat database, you're driven to these third party loaders. And yet they're unable to develop other features like save states because AK refuses to implement it in the first party loader.
So yes, the RPG supports the same cheats database provided you're using a third party solution.
Soft reset has the same compatibility as everywhere else: some games work, some do not. That's how it's always been because of the nature of having to patch the games, my EZFA for GBA was the same way. The only difference was that any GBA roms that wouldn't work simply wouldn't permit the option to become enabled, and with the RPG you'll have to try it to discover whether it whitescreens.
ROM and homebrew compatibility are ostensibly the same no matter which product you choose. The only product I can recall failing at the prior was the DS-X and those were special circumstances where it was managed by a bunch of crooks. The latter can be attributed to the development of DLDI.
Never tried Opera on it, but I don't know what to say if that's really a major factor for you. If you wanted a portable system that can browse the web you shouldn't have even bought a DS in the first place. My understanding is that yes it does, provided you have the patched copy+a slot two solution just like any other card.
And I'm not even sure how to respond to the mp3 + dpg inquiry. Isn't that what Moonshell does? Why would the experience be any different from one card to the next? That's like asking whether Mario Kart would play the same on the NDS classic as the Lite.
I keep hearing that the RPG has a limited save capacity, but have yet to see the effects myself. Daigasso or whatever it's called worked fine for me despite claims to the contrary.
Personally, after owning it for a couple months I'm still happy to have gone with the open source product. Yet I recognize that open source doesn't necessarily mean that something is better, and I can't help but wonder which features I'm missing out on if I had gone with a Cyclo. From my understanding, they actually implement things like slow motion and save states where Acekard seems like they don't want to do any work on behalf of all these customers.