shane1972 said:
Anyway i still love the r4 and now 1.18 has been released with rts lets just wait for sdhc support which i really think is available with a firmware update rather then hardware.
Ummm, Shane... did you notice the release date from the changelog?
QUOTE said:
Update R4 v1.18 kernel 2008-4-1
That said, the things are rugged and reliable and that reliability is *easily* improved with a thin piece of card mounted internally. They're very good at what they do.
ozmodchips
I would like someone to justify why you would pay more for the R4 over all these new great cards, then i will shut up
No, I for one don't want you to shut up ozmodchips - you've got a valid point about the feature sets and the price which, taken by itself, is a real head-scratcher. It's a question that deserves to be asked, because people deserve to have accurate information at their fingertips.
So, I'll ask you a couple of questions then.
If I was looking for a replacement for the R4 with SDHC, what would you recommend? One key requirement is decent folder support, as I'm sure you can appreciate what a pain in the rear it would be to have to scroll through the 70-odd bits of shovelware you could fit on even a 2-gig card without folders. It doesn't need to have a menu exactly like the R4, and in fact I'm sure it won't, but the ability to quickly and easily navigate through a folder heirachy to select whatever I want to play at any particular sitting is a must-have.
Another key requirement is a case that's easily and safely openable, in the event that a shim is needed for a particular DS - that probably precludes anything that's glued or clipped together, based on my experience with the M3Real.
A third requirement is that the menu mustn't be overly-complicated - I'll use the M3Real as an example of what I'm *not* looking for.
(A fourth, extremely minor point might be the ability to customise the kernel to replace branding elements with things like "Billy's Cartridge" or "Laura's Cartridge" to reduce fights between siblings - that's something I've found handy with the R4 on occasion, and no, editing a BMP isn't as easy as a couple of minutes with a hex editor or a purpose-built tool like Injektor)
So, what would you suggest, given those requirements?
You mentioned "Mums" - well, let's expand that to include people who don't want the user interface to get in the way of the user experience. And let's further expand that by analogy - Macintosh Vs PC, Circa 1998. The Mac, for all its user-friendliness, was over-priced if you looked at it on purely technical and price grounds. Having to manually allocate more RAM for applications - ha, that's so Windows 2.0 - plus a whole lot of other annoyances that anyone who had to support both Mac and PCs could attest to. The flip side is, some of those very limitations actually turned out to be strengths from the user-experience perspective - most of the time stuff just worked on the mac, and if it didn't the rebuild process was dead easy. The UI was a little more "idiot proof", meaning that non-technical users didn't have as much of a learning curve and occasionally power-users found it getting less in their way than Windows did. Also, the build quality on Macs tended to be a little (a lot?) better than most of what was being sold in the Windows world at the lower price-points.
Now, let's get back to reality. We're talking about something that people will use for fun, at a price-point of about AUD50 to AUD70. A thousand dollars between a PC and Mac wasn't enough to dissuade people from buying macs, so do you really think it's appropriate to describe people who choose to spend AUD20 more for something that works the way they want it to as "Retarded"? Sure, the cheaper cards may do more and may be technically "better", but doing what the user wants *well* counts for a hell of a lot. I wouldn't describe anyone who purchased an R4 or even an EZFlash V as retarded for the same reasons I wouldn't describe most people who bought Macs as retarded.
The other thing is, price is very much governed by demand - as I'm sure you've noticed. Way back when, it was possible to get Chinese R4s for US$25 one-off including postage. Ah, those were the days. Several shortages later, and even in the midst of a flurry of clones, the best people seem to be able to come up with is about US$45 including postage. And they're managing to sell them at that, too. People want the things because they and their kids don't have to think too much about using them, and don't find the way they work inconvenient. People spend ages learning to program their phone, their VCR, their microwave... they don't want to have to think too much when they go to play a game, and the very simplicity of the R4 is its greatest asset.
I have an M3Real and a DSTT, and personally I tend to spend more time playing around with the more technical aspects of my DSTT these days. My family, however, would lynch me if I tried to replace their R4s with either of the other carts I own, and quite justifiably so - from their perspective, that of a user who just wants to easily select and use stuff from the menus, it would be a big leap backwards. They don't care about backing up save files. They don't care about SDHC - and no, I don't think the 4-gig SDHC cards are at the "sweet spot" price-wise yet for casual users or first-time purchasers.
So, *please* show me something else that fits *my* requirements, and those of most of my friends, and I'll gladly consider switching to it for future recommendations - I don't like the direction the prices have been heading, or the recent supply uncertainties, and I'm willing to look at anything on its merits. Until then I'll have to stick with the "Safe" choice, the "easy" choice, the one I know I can do something to so they'll never have problems with the cartridge not being recognised by the DS, the one I know won't confuse them with choices they don't give a fat rats clacker about. Sure, by purely technical metrics it's "inferior" and "overpriced" - just like the late '90's consumer and low-end business Macintoshes - but it's not *that* much more expensive and from a usability perspective for *basic* operations it's *very* hard to beat.
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