Hacking You remember the first time you formatted your comp?

[biggyfred]

First time caller, long time listener. Bought my parts through the links here, hope there's a referral link in there somewhere...

Anyway. You know the drill. You format that sucker. You're looking at a fresh comp, thinking of all the stuff that needs to go on. Flash. Firefox. PDF reader. This and that. The list goes on. You can't help but feel sorry for the poor sap that's doing it for the first (or 5th) time because they're going to forget or miss half the job.

That's where I'm at. I've got an EDGE card and a 3-in-1 on its way to me. A couple of 2gb Kingstons in hand, waiting for their new homes. Which brings me in a very long winded way to my question. You're staring at this hardware. What does your setup routine look like? What's that program/script/nuance that I'm going to miss the first 5 times around? What are those problems that are gonna creep up on me and give me (more) premature grey hairs?

You know how you always wondered why someone didn't just ask you for your setup routine? I'm that guy. I'm jumping in head first. Anything that can help cushion the fall would be absolutely lovely.

Thanks to any and all in advance.

In a somewhat unrelated topic, it took everything I had not to have my first post be one asking if I could play GBA games with my slot 1 device. It's hilarious how often that question gets asked.

edited for speling.

 

[Da-Huntha]

Welcome to the boards I guess.
You could always make images which install all the stuff at setup, if you think you have to reinstall often.

 

[Bri]

biggyfred,

I assume you're asking about setting up your Edge rather than your PC.

But really, setup's a snap. Reformat your microSD, download the latest firmware, install it at the root of your microSD, make a "games" folder on the microSD, copy over your .nds files to the "games" folder, use the "safely remove hardware" option to remove your microSD, insert the microSD into your cart, insert your cart into your NDS, turn on your NDS...That's it!

Homebrew is a little more difficult (but not much) because the files you need to copy and where you need to place them vary (just read the instructions or visit the website for the homebrew). If you have an expansion pack, you'll want to grab a GBA loader (Rudolph's GBA ExpLoader supports several different expansion packs), and copy some .gba files and/or the Opera Browser to your microSD.

I also like to keep an exact copy of my microSD card in a folder on my hard drive so if I have to reformat, I can just copy everything back over exactly as I had it. You'll also want to make backups of your save (.sav) files to your hard drive in case your microSD card gets corrupt.

-Bri

 

[Urza]

I'm pretty sure he means his PC.

Just make sure that once you have everything setup to your liking, backup the drive to an image with something like DriveImage XML. I strongly believe that Windows-users should format at least twice a year to maintain optimal performance, and having a nice image to restore and start from can cut out ALOT, if not most of the legwork.

Make sure to always use a disc stripped of all the unnecessary bloatware like WMP, IE, extraneous processes, etc.
http://www.nliteos.com/

 

[biggyfred]

I did mean the DS setup. After re-reading my post, I saw how poorly my attempt at "interesting" went. You'd think at some point I would have made that obvious. Duh. My apologies.

Bri, that was exactly what I was looking for. Thanks a ton, dude. Having never owned a DS (or handheld since the OG Gameboy brick), I can't believe how thriving the mod community is surrounding it. This is really great stuff. Thanks for the post.

Urza, having been a Windows user for a god awful long time, I completely agree with your twice a year statement. It's what keeps everything ticking, and it's one of the big reasons I jumped to linux.

 

[Bri]

biggyfred, you're welcome. I only recently got into this DS stuff after getting one as a gift from my boss (he obviously thought I was getting too much work done).

urza, I have once again benefited from your wealth of knowledge. I didn't know about nLite for the PC, but I am going to use it in the future! I guess that beats buying a new PC every 6 months and throwing the old one away!

-Bri