Hacking Hardware r4isdhc.hk 2024+ carts now use R4DS Pro hardware

[FR0ZN]

Official wood has RTS with r4ids.cn or r4idsn.com. But non of the unofficial wood clones have RTS.

I looked at it the last few weeks and it seems that there are (at least) 2 manufacturers who make R4 clones without RTS capabilties.
They can be identified by the following characteristics:

- "Smart Upgrade" written on the label
- Either has www.r4isdhc.hk or www.r4isdhc.com.cn on the label
- Deep Labyrinth icon in the DS menu

Those carts are pretty much like any Ace3DS cart and don't come with any special features.
Those can be seen here:


There are however also R4 clone carts that DO support the RTS feature.
Those can be identified by the following characteristics:

- "Real Time Save" written on the label
- Only www.r4isdhc.com on the label
- Bomberman icon in the DS menu

A video about those exists here, which also shows the RTS feature and that it indeed works:


I don't know if that RTS menu is exactly the same as from the real Wood kernel as I have never seen it before, but it looks good to me.

There is also a cart that was apperently never released but somehow made its way online.
It has some sort of frankenstein kernel which is kinda based on Wood but seems to have implemented its own RTS in-game menu.
This cart and its features can be seen here in a german review:

 

[anotherthing]

A video about those exists here, which also shows the RTS feature and that it indeed works:

I bought this card based on the recommendation in this video. If you get it from the affiliate link, the SD card on it(which is utter crap, BTW) comes loaded with Pokemon and other NDS ROM hacks. A lot of the Pokemon ROM Hacks I have been unable to locate and had to patch myself.

Also, the 520in1 cartridge that is on Amazon is identical to this card.

 

[Technicmaster0]

I don't know if that RTS menu is exactly the same as from the real Wood kernel as I have never seen it before, but it looks good to me.

It's not the same menu. There have also been other flashcarts with RTS in the past (e.g. cyclods ievolution, supercard dsone/dstwo and I think also M3i) and cards without RTS (original DSTT, DS-X and many more). The R4 with RTS that you linked a video about is generally not seen as a good one since it has a timebomb.
In general, many youtube videos are not a good source of information on R4 cards because the content creators don't do much research. They see the next best thing on aliexpress (or somewhere else), buy it and are happy with it because it works pretty well. but they don't seem to care about the finer details between the different cards (or things like the timebomb).
Tho this statement is a bit ironic because the last video you linked was made by me.

 

[FR0ZN]

It's not the same menu. There have also been other flashcarts with RTS in the past (e.g. cyclods ievolution, supercard dsone/dstwo and I think also M3i) and cards without RTS (original DSTT, DS-X and many more). The R4 with RTS that you linked a video about is generally not seen as a good one since it has a timebomb.
In general, many youtube videos are not a good source of information on R4 cards because the content creators don't do much research. They see the next best thing on aliexpress (or somewhere else), buy it and are happy with it because it works pretty well. but they don't seem to care about the finer details between the different cards (or things like the timebomb).
Tho this statement is a bit ironic because the last video you linked was made by me.

Ah it's you! Grüße gehen raus

What I always wondered is why no cart is able to replicate whatever the original R4 had and just enable it to run the latest official R4

Or why can't we take one of those fake R4 RTS kernels and make them work on Ace3DS carts for example?

 

[Technicmaster0]

What I always wondered is why no cart is able to replicate whatever the original R4 had and just enable it to run the latest official R4

The original R4 was limited to 2GB (or to be more prcise: SD. SDHC doesn't work) storage. That's not something that you want to have with modern cards.

Or why can't we take one of those fake R4 RTS kernels and make them work on Ace3DS carts for example?

I'm not entirely sure how RTS works in detail. But as far as I know, both the flashcart itself (it's FPGA) and the menu have to support it. And even then it can be of varying degrees. It's not perfect with any card because some hardware of the DS can't be read (which is necessary to make a backup of the memory that you can later restore).
It's probably a major effort to implement a RTS function that works good enough.

 

[JackHuman]

r4isdhc.hk carts marked with the year 2024, has replaced its old Ace3DS+ PCBs with ones of the R4DS Pro, they can be identified by a gold solder mask if you look on the cartridge's contacts. These DO NOT apparently work with a DSi or 3DS

In fact, they work at least with DSi and 3DS old

 

[SylverReZ]

In fact, they work at least with DSi and 3DS old

ONLY if you have custom firmware installed.

 

[PotatoStatic]

Yeah. I was able to lift up the edges of the cart to take a peek under the shell and confirmed there is a screw in the center down near the bottom of the label so it's definitely held together with screw. The screw location is very similar to the screw location on the og R4 shell. (just with the screw coming in from the label side instead of the backside)

Oh so does the R4iSDHC ntrboot installer have different code for different version of the R4iSDHC? So yeah perhaps it's just misidentifying it then? It drops the GCD image at 0x0 in the flash dump...but I think this is incorrect? because that's not how the bomber man rom was setup in the flash image.

Oddly enough though if I go into the unlaunch menu the cart shows up like this:
View attachment 413065

As a result I can't boot it directly with Unlaunch.

NTR_Launcher shows header CRC error too so likely same issue. GM9i was able to rom dump it correctly though...so not sure what's going on there.

I have an actual unbranded R4DSPro clone. You can observe similar behavior with Twilight Menu on the 3DS. If you boot it directly from the home screen it works perfectly fine every time. If you launch it from Twilight Menu with the "Launch slot-1 card" option it freezes with the top screen white and the bottom screen black every time. It's pretty curious behavior.

 

[SylverReZ]

Another card I had found on Reddit uses the same circuit board, this one was by R4I-U(.)com.