What was your first flashcard/hardware mod on a console? How did you discover them?

[FAST6191]

Don't really think it was a first as much as an introduction over decades

There was an Amiga in the house as a kid. I am pretty sure they used to make official games for it but I only ever saw those copied floppies, of which there were a mountain. Surprisingly my C64 collection was all legit somehow.

School themselves had everything on copied floppy discs for the edutainment stuff.
Also on school machines all the kids put whatever they liked so I learned DOS and stuff that way.

PCs were still prohibitively expensive (it was estimated the big costs for a family were house, car, PC with the latter being an optional purchase) and rapidly upgrading so it would be a few years before I could get my own. Had various things throughout this but it did happen in the end.

That day arrived but it was only a mighty olivetti 386 so many copied games ensued. https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-...AAAAAAAAP0/1OjNdieOcwg/w800-h800/olivetti.jpg was something like it.

I had continued on throughout this with consoles but as second hand games were cheap enough that was me.

At some time around then I discovered emulation thanks to a computer fayre and thus replayed all my favourite megadrive games on genecyst. Also some gb/gbc games and a friend had a SNES CD. Emulation sections, though not necessarily ROM downloads, were a popular thing on major game sites of the day (the game revolution emulation section being quite well curated).

As dial up was a thing a single game represented something fairly major and thus said computer fayre collections were somewhat important.

GBA emulation was done from the start but required a more capable machine than I had so I was not really following things.

My machine might have been crap but friends got good ones so we were quite familiar with copying games/nocd cracks (thank you rental shops and return policies). Also good for network/serial port games where you might technically have needed one CD per player.

Dark rumours of people that could mod your PS1 or find a cheat device that copied games. A few went down this path.
A friend and I got CD burners for our respective birthdays and Christmas that year. These were not the nice and refined devices you have today (what's buffer underrun? I have to defrag my hard drive to burn an iso?)

I also had a N64 with a gameshark and learned to make cheats for it. I had played with a game genie for the megadrive but was limited to onboard cheats for it. Previously I had some experience with poke codes on my C64 and trainers on the Amiga. Later (as I wanted to cheat in Draken that would have been 1999 or 2000) I would get a cheat device for the PC (one of the big console cheat device companies made a PC thing with a dongle and sold it in eb games, now game, and sold it for £20 or so), now I know it to be a debugger and I should have saved my money but it had a nice GUI. One of my cousins returned from the US with a cheat device for the GBC and thus we all had mews for pokemon (which at the time was still seen as a bit of a long shot to come to Europe).

I played a GBA once or twice, my brother had traded for an original GBA but it only had a handful of boring games*, but it was another cousin's megaman battle network 2 I think it was that really caught my attention.

*to this day I refuse to replay Fortress for the GBA. While some speak of Atari games as being the example of games where you often needed a manual to know what was going on/how to play then that is the example my mind goes to.

I got a laptop with some grunt. GBA emulation was a thing for about 5 minutes (had way too many other games) and then one of the forums/sites mentioned flash carts. That summer I was in the US on holiday for a few months and got a flash cart shipped there, and picked up my beloved NES styled GBA SP that I have had ever since.

My long time low skill fiddling with PC game mods and asset ripping would then become my avenue into DS ROM ripping and then ROM hacking, something my greasy student self could do for no money which was nice and provided a still fairly intellectually demanding alternative from considering forces all day long.

While I ended up knowing a lot for the GBA it would be during the DS and 360 that I found myself learning almost all there was to know about the state of play at those times, following Scene developments and properly refining my skill sets such that I can approach most new systems and do what I do.

The rest as they say is history, or not as I skipped the 3ds as it has no games.

 

[supergamer368]

R4i, still have it, installed NTRBOOT with it, play SM64 with it, use it, have it, etc

 

[Shadow#1]

okok let5s stop this before my thread becomes a spiderman thread

 

[Flame]

i dont remember all the small details... i knew something like a flashcart was available on the GBA but once the DSi was released i decide to do a like research and so i decide to get a DSi flashcart which was the Supercard DSonei and the rest is history really

The rest as they say is history, or not as I skipped the 3ds as it has no games.

define what a game is then?

 

[FAST6191]

define what a game is then?

Always a fun thing to pin down.

In my case I loved my GBA, loved my DS and everybody that made those two great pissed off to do other things when the 3ds came around (I don't really care for Nintendo in house stuff beyond Advance Wars and Starfy, and the latter is more amusing than anything resembling a system seller to me). I imagine if I had missed out on both the GBA and the DS I could have had some fun on the 3ds but every time I went looking it was almost a rehash of a DS game if there was anything -- the DS was an improved GBA and did all sorts of nice things, can't really say the same for the 3ds.

 

[Lmaokernel]

First flashcart was a DSTwo. My friends boyfriend told me about them and introduced me to the scene. Had no idea it was possible until then.

I remember updating my ps3 from 3.55 and he told me I was making a big mistake but I didn't listen

Sent from my toaster running Rebug

 

[Noctosphere]

First flashcart was a DSTwo. My friends boyfriend told me about them and introduced me to the scene. Had no idea it was possible until then.

I remember updating my ps3 from 3.55 and he told me I was making a big mistake but I didn't listen

Sent from my toaster running Rebug

When i got aware of the amount of different flashcart available on the market, it was maybe a month after buying my ttds.
I quickly changed to dstwo because at this time, ttds wasnt supporting gba rom, and thats about when i learned about gba pokemon rom hack

 

[3DSPoet]

Doctor GB card for the Gameboy Color. It had a complicated reader/writer you had to set up via a serial or parallel port (can't remember which) and you had to create a special ROM file that contained a menu-generator and all the roms you wanted on it. Sometime the write would fail and you'd have to start all over I also had a Doctor V64 Nintendo 64 cartridge and the old PSX "Action Replay" devices that used the aux port in the back of the console (which was removed in the final 7000 version). For that one, you had to put a strong spring in the PSX to hold down the lid button. You'd put in an original PSX disc and let it boot up, then press a button on the controller to stop the disk spinning and replace it with your copied disk. Good times....

 

[Noctosphere]

Doctor GB card for the Gameboy Color. It had a complicated reader/writer you had to set up via a serial or parallel port (can't remember which) and you had to create a special ROM file that contained a menu-generator and all the roms you wanted on it. Sometime the write would fail and you'd have to start all over I also had a Doctor V64 Nintendo 64 cartridge and the old PSX "Action Replay" devices that used the aux port in the back of the console (which was removed in the final 7000 version). For that one, you had to put a strong spring in the PSX to hold down the lid button. You'd put in an original PSX disc and let it boot up, then press a button on the controller to stop the disk spinning and replace it with your copied disk. Good times....

I always wondered, how did you put rom on GBC flashcart?
I mean, were microsd available back then?