macgeek417 said:
Um... Pretty much any card that's name consists of a letter and a number is a cheap, made-in-china clone. For example: R4, R4 SDHC, R41 Gold, R4-III, N5, R6, M3.
thats pretty flawed logic
M3i zero / M3 real is one of the best cards on the market right now
cant say the same about the rest however...
Erm...
QUOTE
YushenDS Card, R4DS, M3 DS Simply, and their clones
R4DS (Revolution for DS), YushenDS Card (YDC) and M3DS Simply are essentially the same hardware product. The same method is used to distinguish between Chinese, English and Japanese (and German for the YDC) versions of the cards. The firmware for the various brand and language versions can be readily patched to work on other language or brand versions of the hardware.
The original R4 card was replaced in late 2007 by the "R4 version 2" or "R4v2". This new version removed the need for a spring mechanism to insert a Micro-SD card. Instead, it simply had a slot in the back where a user could manually slot a Micro-SD card in. This eliminated the problems of the original R4 Revolution DS Card where the spring mechanism reportedly malfunctioned after prolonged use.[20][21]
Further confusion has been added by the arrival of numerous poor-quality clones of the YDC(R4,M3) hardware - selling under the brands including N5, E7, ND1, NPlayer, U2DS, MARS and numerous variations on the R4 name, such as "R4DS Upgrade-II", New R4, R4 Deluxe, R4 Advance, R4 DS III, R4 SDHC, R4 Pro, and R4 Ultra. The firmware for genuine YDC(R4) cards is encrypted, although the encryption scheme was broken in 2007 and several utilities exist for encrypting, modifying and decrypting YDC(R4) firmware. The N5 and most other clones use a decrypted version of the firmware; decrypted YDC(R4) firmware can be used on the N5 and some other clone cards, and encrypted clone firmware can be used on the R4. Some clone manufacturers have released modified versions of the firmware to support additional games; others have done away with the R4 firmware entirely and replaced it with homebrew loaders such as YSMenu or other alternatives.
All of these are one-card (Slot-1) solutions that use MicroSD cards for storage, and all the final official firmware versions include Action Replay cheats, auto-DLDI patching and support for Nintendo Wi-Fi connection and Download Play. They also include a hardware-specific version of the Moonshell media player, selection of which is integrated with the main menu. Around August 2007, the R4 team also revised the hardware to use a springless memory slot as there had been significant complaints about the failure of the slot.
Unlike newer cards, the R4 cannot read SDHC (Secure Digital High Capacity) cards due to hardware limitations, although certain clones add this functionality. There exist several clones of the R4 card that are capable of using SDHC cards, but some studies have suggested that certain types of these cards have high failure rates. One clone, named the "R4 SDHC", is reported to be reliable. R4DS is now known to be outdated, as many other flashcarts are known to be better and cheaper (Acekard 2, M3 Real Supercard One, and Edge), and a genuine R4DS is hard to find.[22]
R4 has been banned from sale in Japan.[23]
