New Flash Kit: Acekard R.P.G. announced! *Update*

[sasuke_kun12]

Well, this si now old news to me, can we please continue to talk about how much the CycloEVO pwns everything?

do you even own one?

 

[felix123]

Open source is awesome to allow the community to do its own fixes for game incompatibilities/bugs etc. but the only thing I would be worried about is if there's multiple firmwares out there, it would get confusing/annoying to keep track of which one had what fixes... what if no single firmware has all the features/fixes you want?

"Wer die Wahl hat, hat die Qual."(Who has the choice has the pain.) - German proverb
But having too many options is always better than not having a choice.

Great minds think alike

Just shows we are smarter than the others on here by doing some simple research from a link that was posted in the original post...

That 8GBit part was added after GBAtemp posted the news.

 

[Hiratai]

Well, this si now old news to me, can we please continue to talk about how much the CycloEVO pwns everything?
do you even own one?

Now I do, I got it in the mail yesterday. After selling my dreaded R4.

 

[sasuke_kun12]

fair enough, wish i had a cycloDS. I'm too poor to own one

 

[ridgecity]

It won't be the first card with an iPhone interface look at the G6...

download

download

 

[Hiratai]

fair enough, wish i had a cycloDS. I'm too poor to own one

Well I sold my R4 and my 2gb, for a CycloEVo with a 2gb.

And I got it for the EXACT same price, as when I sold it. Talk about a sweet deal.

 

[villa_bryan]

1 gigabyte of onboard memory is a nice touch for those who want it to work off the bat without buying a memory card.

but obviously it's gonna be the fact that this thing is opensource that's gonna win ppl over.

i think the homebrew, and rom hacking, scene has show to what extent ppl are willing to go get what they want out their ds or to get what others want.

in the end all that's needed is good compatibality and a few good, willing, progammers to make this thing go snowballing out of control.

will keep an eye on

 

[Hiratai]

People will be happy that it's open source, now. But it will also lead to the death of it. Like Tupac...

 

[Xcursion]

It won't be the first card with an iPhone interface look at the G6...

download

download

Those are just skins. The box art don't actually move.

 

[OSW]

W00t! when i first read it i thought it had 8gbit capacity but if thats actually 8gigabyte its pretty impressive!


I was thinking 8 gigabytes, yeh right...will be just as expensive as an ipod mini.

I am erring on the side of thinking that it's probably an engrish translation error, 8 gigabits more like...
and for those saying that R4 is way better, pshhh...stop being such fanboys, i love the R4 but the features claimed for this is quite impressive

Does no-one read the website? they clearly state

8 Gbit

Edit: my bad, someone else already posted it.

 

[rest0re]

oh the kids, oh the kids

open source seems to be fucking magic word that you can put and kids go crazy? so what if no dev will buy it ever. woah. guess what? there is your open source then. coz nobody cares to dev it.

and then it seems okay card to me but .. blaa

 

[shadow1w2]

been waiting for a card like this. Just need to know the price now and a good seller.
Definitly grabbing this one :3
Open source for the win! xD

Though I bet the eight gigs will send the price way up.
But hey, atleast we dont have to pay for the software.

Edit: Ok, if its Eight gigabits then why does the front page say gigabytes?
Though thinking about it, only having a single gig would be even better xD
Cost less and still have an SD card option. Perfect.

Oh and the buety of opensource is that ANYONE can jump in and dev it up.
I think the main appeal will be for those who want to ultra customize their card software or those who want to create extra features by taking advantage of the hardware in full.
Say like wiring a hard drive to it and reprograming it to take full advantage of it or control it better.

Still, its really just for the option.
Having the possibillity makes the lack of updates feel less intimidating.
Opensource is great to have if a dev picks it up or not.
Heck, even lazy arses like myself could pick up some coding tutorials and reprogram it myself.
Its all about the options man.

 

[DjoeN]

If acekard give away there rpg cards to devvers for free, you maight see a huge support, that is IF the do that

(I would, just like neoflash does)

 

[Sinkhead]

oh the kids, oh the kids

open source seems to be fucking magic word that you can put and kids go crazy? so what if no dev will buy it ever. woah. guess what? there is your open source then. coz nobody cares to dev it.

and then it seems okay card to me but .. blaa

If the Acekard Team don't give some away to developers I might... You know, giving stuff back to the community and all that... But it depends on how much it costs

- Sam

 

[johnchan]

A few things...

a) This thing will be far too expensive for most people, and I dont think the high price will be justifyable considering the features. Dual storage is nice but its not necessary. Most people simply want to play games, and for this you dont need anything special. Other products like R4 and CycloDS provide great features, support and compatibility at a fraction of the price that this thing will be sold for. The cost of NAND flash chips right now is quite high, while the prices for MicroSD cards continue to fall. This trend does not bode well for any devices with onboard storage.

b) Open Source is nothing to get really excited about. While it will be nice to see how their software works and maybe tinker around with the code, do you really think that homebrew developers are doing to devote their time to improving software which can only be used on a single device, leaving everybody else with different flash cards out in the cold? I dont think so. There are some great things happening in the homebrew community such as DSOrganise and DSChannels - these applications could make great replacements for the GUI's of various flash carts. I anticipate that we'll see more work on projects like these which can be used by anybody, rather than work which would be locked to a single piece of hardware. Thanks to DLDI, its already possible to access the filesystem on just about every flashcard. The main thing missing now to achieve full integration between homebrew software and flash cards is some way to load ROM's via homebrew software. If some interface similar to DLDI was created for the purpose of playing ROM's then we would have our answer. That way flashcart vendors could simply provide their "ROM driver" and DLDI driver, which would be patched into a homebrew loader to provide full integration. Imagine using something like DSChannels to load your ROM's on R4, CycloDS, EZV etc.

 

[quartercast]

A few things...

a) This thing will be far too expensive for most people, and I dont think the high price will be justifyable considering the features. Dual storage is nice but its not necessary. Most people simply want to play games, and for this you dont need anything special. Other products like R4 and CycloDS provide great features, support and compatibility at a fraction of the price that this thing will be sold for. The cost of NAND flash chips right now is quite high, while the prices for MicroSD cards continue to fall. This trend does not bode well for any devices with onboard storage.

b) Open Source is nothing to get really excited about. While it will be nice to see how their software works and maybe tinker around with the code, do you really think that homebrew developers are doing to devote their time to improving software which can only be used on a single device, leaving everybody else with different flash cards out in the cold? I dont think so. There are some great things happening in the homebrew community such as DSOrganise and DSChannels - these applications could make great replacements for the GUI's of various flash carts. I anticipate that we'll see more work on projects like these which can be used by anybody, rather than work which would be locked to a single piece of hardware. Thanks to DLDI, its already possible to access the filesystem on just about every flashcard. The main thing missing now to achieve full integration between homebrew software and flash cards is some way to load ROM's via homebrew software. If some interface similar to DLDI was created for the purpose of playing ROM's then we would have our answer. That way flashcart vendors could simply provide their "ROM driver" and DLDI driver, which would be patched into a homebrew loader to provide full integration. Imagine using something like DSChannels to load your ROM's on R4, CycloDS, EZV etc.

a) i. On the contrary, I don't see Acekard making this cart much more expensive. The Acekard+ was very reasonably priced at the time (50 AUD), and 8Gb NAND flash carts are quite low in price (8Gb MK5: 45 AUD ex shipping). Flash carts are very well priced these days. Think about it, how much does a real game cost, 60 AUD? Are you saying most people can't afford to buy 2 DS games? Come on.. get real! Given this took 10 months to manufacture, and that it's being manufactured by an asian company, I reckon it'll be priced around 100 AUD. I remember when the groundbreaking slot-2 lite solutions came out, they were around that price.

ii. You obviously haven't played many games on a flashcart. All slot-1 microSD solutions are hampered by the latency of the reader/microSD card, which cause some (popular!) games to freeze. Most NAND-flash ram based carts to date are plagued by slow write speeds, and all are hampered by unexpandable memory. This appears to be a best-of-both-worlds solution!


b) So, what excites you then? As far as most of the GBAtemp community are concerned, this is the cart they've been waiting for - for a long, long time! Human beings are naturally creative, this will allow them to be. Why do people spend so much time making custom firmware for all sorts of devices? Because the device didn't support a feature which they wanted, or they just wanted to get it to do some funky things that weren't intended originally!

Anyways.. happy moaning to you

EDIT: cleanup

 

[TLSpartan]

The SCDS is open source.

 

[azotyp]

if it will be open source, maybe m3simply and r4ds programmers will copy and modify its code, so we can have cool menus on m3simply and r4ds

 

[quartercast]

Meh, why would you want to develop for the Scone anyways

Good point though

 

[TLSpartan]

So, this isnt the first open source flash cart. Its just the first where it has been advertised