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Very descriptive, and I am very interested in the DS Linker clones. The only ones that I have currently is the Fire Link. I am hoping to find more of these if I ever go to another gaming convention.These are the flashcarts I own. Of those the rarest ones I got are the DS Linker, DS-Xtreme and maybe the M3 DS Real.
I still have the packaging to 3 of these. Got the complete packaging to the DSXtreme and Acekard 2i and the inner label slip to the plastic thing for the R4. Have the packaging to the Max Media Dock too though I can't be assed to dig that out of somewhere deep in my bedroom. I forgot where I put it but I do recall still having it.
I recently acquired the DS Linker and DSTwo.
Of these I think the DS Linker is the oldest cart I have. It's a clone of the N-Card. I used to own that one many years go but sadly sold it. Really wish I didn't.
The N-Card and it's clones have surprisingly good game compatibility in the modern age. At least the few I've tried. Even boots modern SDK5 games. The only issue would be save compatibility perhaps and lack of antipiracy patches. That's a far cry from some of the older MicroSD based flashcarts. They have issues booting newer games.
DS-Xtreme's loader...sucks. Everything about that cart is somehow worse of them all. it's nand based cart like the N-card but it's crippled with slower access speeds and terrible game compatiblity. It seems like it could have been a decent card but the FPGA programming is likely it's weakness. The USB side of it can access the nand pretty quick which proves the FPGA is the bottle neck and it's using a ProAsic3 from what I recall which is no sloucher so it's just bad programming I think.
The DS Linker is a different beast. It seems pretty quick. The only weakness being the USB connection speed being rather poor due to GBA slot bottle neck. But aside from that it pretty much kicks the DSX's ass and can sorta keep up with the modern cards.
This is super surprising. The N-Card and it's clones are all the same hardware wise and predate the first R4s. They are some of the first standalone slot1 flashcarts to come about and yet somehow can boot some of the last games made. It's kinda impressive. It seems the FPGA is emulating the card reads. From the RE work me and lifehackerhansol has done so far seems to indicate this card is using emulated B7 card reads. FPGA is likely just setting the offset to zero for the start of the rom to be booted and emulating all the needed card read commands and the loader likely isn't patching the games that much aside from save related stuff perhaps. Ended up making it pretty future proof in the end.
Kinda wish the DSX team just stole the codebase from that. Might have made it the go to nand cart.
The only real con to owning a N-Card or one of it's clones is the DLDI support. They used the older 32KB DLDI spec. Don't let the nrio.dldi file that's out there fool you. As far as I can tell the one has never worked. Not on the newer homebrew anyways. I managed to dump the dldi that xmenu autopatches in and that's how I discovered they actually use the older spec for DLDI. Hopefully this will get sorted out soon and us DSi owners can transfer files and such to this cart via GM9i. I already managed to achieve that with DS-Xtreme.
Which reminds me I need to put out a fork of that so others can use it.
Awesome collection. I need those.
Last edited by SylverReZ,
