Hacking Slowdown on my AK2i

[idn]

Hello,

I bought an AK2i recently (original, checked with the code), threw in latest AKAIO and a shitload of games and... slowdown, wtf?

Last time I had slowdown on my NDS was with the original M3 Lite on Slot 2. Then I bought a R4, put in Wood and everything was fine and dandy. All that time my MicroSD was a 2GB Kingston, kinda old and slow, but the games worked OK.

Now I have a 3DS, so I had to buy a new flashcart. I also bought a Class 10 8 GB Kingston to go with it. Class 10, that's like, leagues above that old Kingston I had in my R4. Yet, it doesn't even pass the Dawn of Sorrow intro test (gets a bit jerky near the end).

The worst of all is Ultimate Mortal Kombat. It bogs down to unplayable levels and flickers. What the hell... I checked the MicroSD on my laptop - 6MB/s. So it's not really Class 10, but still, 6MB/s should be way above enough. What's up with that?

So... what MicroSD should I buy to avoid this problem? I don't want to test many different cards, just finally buy one that works. Price doesn't matter, I just want a good 8GB card that won't suffer from any slowdowns.

 

[Rydian]

Hm, can you run an SD speed tester on your PC?

Class is write speed, not read speed (though it would be odd for a class-10 to have such a slow read speed).

 

[idn]

Yeah, Class 10 my ass.

I used HD Tach and h2testw. They are pretty consistent:

Random Access: 2.5 ms
Read: 6 MB/s
Write: 3 MB/s

Not even Class 4. Damn you Kingston. Still, 3 MB/s should be OK for NDS games I think...

BTW, I also tested my Sansa Clip+'s internal memory (I'm using it as a card reader because I lost my MicroSD -> SD adapter somewhere), just to be sure it's not interfering (many cheap readers do that), and it came out 1 MB/s better both in read and write speeds. So, I think it's safe to assume that my Kingston is crappy.

Back to my first question then - what should I buy that won't disappoint me the way Kingston has?

 

[Another World]

are you sure its a legit kingston and not a clone or a rebranded card from another country?

did you run the panasonic formatter on the card? it will often fix many issues you may experience from using another formatting application.

i've had great luck with transcend 8gb class6 msd cards. i use 2 exclusively for debugging and beta testing and 3 others for homebrew enjoyment.

-another world

 

[Normmatt]

Try disabling the AAP bypass for this game aswell as cheats and softreset. The first one should be enough as it enables some more speed optimizations that cant be run with AAP enabled.

 

[idn]

are you sure its a legit kingston and not a clone or a rebranded card from another country?

did you run the panasonic formatter on the card? it will often fix many issues you may experience from using another formatting application.

i've had great luck with transcend 8gb class6 msd cards. i use 2 exclusively for debugging and beta testing and 3 others for homebrew enjoyment.

-another world

Well, I don't know. Looks legit. I bought it at a biggest online PC retailer in Madrid, I doubt they would have fakes, but hey, you never know. Is there a reliable method of checking whether the card might be rebranded?

And yes, I did format it with the Panasonic tool, like always.

Thanks for recommending the Transcend. I'll order one from Amazon. It's truly Class 6, I hope?

Try disabling the AAP bypass for this game aswell as cheats and softreset. The first one should be enough as it enables some more speed optimizations that cant be run with AAP enabled.

Thanks! It's playable now. Actually, the first thing I did when I got the AK2i and installed AKAIO was to disable cheats globally, because I read that they can cause slowdown, though I didn't touch AAP.

UMK still has a bit more slowdown than the retail cart (which also has slowdowns, such is the beauty of UMK), but it's manageable now. I think I'll survive like this until the Transcend arrives and the Kingston will be relegated to permanent secondary storage for Sansa.

 

[Rydian]

The thing with Kingston is...
http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=918