It may be a legal grey area but I personally have no issue pirating a game if its not for sale anymore. I'd rather "risk jail time" over spending $200 to get pokemon platinum from a collector.

The problem with "ROM Piracy" is that these systems are so old the creators don't sell the games themselves anymore, so if you buy a cart from someone you CANT say you supported the developers because they won't see a penny of that money. The collectors will. Save your money and download games they stop selling

At some point I felt bad about pirating old games that arent for sale at retail stores anymore... That point ended after I wasn't able to find those games easily and had bills to pay

My dad got us R4i cards back in the day when he had read some news about rampant piracy and the devices used to allow it. Obviously he very quickly got us some. I played so many games I never would have because of that lol. He also did movie encodes of like, cloudy with a chance of meatballs and what not so we could watch it on our DSes. Wonderful man he was.

There's another really cool thing you can do with some DS flashcarts that you didn't mention: you can reflash them (or even just flip a switch on some of them) for something called "NTR Boot". What does this do? Well, every console in the 3DS family has an undocumented feature built into the boot ROM that allows it to load firmware from a DS cartridge instead of the internal memory. This was presumably added so Nintendo can use it as the equivalent of a bootable USB for repairing bricked consoles. But now that hackers have figured out how to trick the boot ROM (which, btw, can't be patched) into booting firmware without a valid signature, we can use this feature to unbrick our own consoles and even install custom firmware on them.

Remember kids, it's always morally correct to pirate out of print games, and extra correct to pirate any Nintendo product.

The timebomb carts (at least the ones shown as examples in the video) can install a replacement kernel/frontend called YSMenu that removes the timebomb (which is just a software 'feature', not a hardware one). Once you've done that, they're perfectly serviceable cards that work as well as any other.

Honestly, the Wii or even Wii U had a pretty good home brew history, with the Wii the bigger one than the Wii U. The Wii home brew scene is worth looking at and giving shoutouts for.

I'm also very grateful to the people who translated Ace Attorney Investigations 2 which was only released in Japan. Man, was I blown away by that. Oh, and to those too who translated Touch Detective Part 3, which again was released only in Japan on the 3DS. I highly recommend everyone to play both of these games; there's a reason they got fan translations. (Their prequels are available outside of Japan)

Holy this brought back some childhood memories. Pretty much everyone with a DS and a slight bit of knowledge about the good old world wide web had them here. We called them "schummelkarte", basically German for "cheating card", as you could actually use cheats in a lot of pirated games. Damn those were some good times.

I commonly see unfortunate collectors excited to receive their new ds game, only to receive a cart with an SD card, often they don’t know that these are fakes and meant for pirating and home brew. As a home brew lover, and games collector, I like seeing videos like this thy cover what these types of carts are meant for

The R4 Upgrade Snoopy Revolution looks pretty dope But yea the homebrew scene for the ds is amazing, It's crazy to see it still getting games like Super Mario Galaxy DS and Sonic Adventure DS, just impressive

with flashcards that have time bombs, there’s almost always a way to remove it through replacing the internal files! you can almost certainly find a tutorial on how to do so as long as you have one of the more popular ones

Fantastic video! You gotta talk about DSi modding, it's actually criminally underrated how much you can do now on a DSi with just an SD Card and some custom firmware

Here where I live in Venezuela, it actually was more common to see people with flashcarts than original DS games lmao

Oh god I remember the whole controversy with Gateway bricking 3DS consoles because people were pirating their firmware; and that Gateway had a form of really hostile DRM that would brick any pirated version of their firmware. Those were the days.

I’m impressed how rapidly your quality is evolving. I did not even recognise you at first as the “gamecube mini guy”. Great video, keep it up! :)

Modding your 3DS also allows for playing all this homebrew and more since its more powerful, I would really recommend it!

Notes from someone who used a lot of different flashcarts for a long time during it's hayday. 1: "Each show up as a random game to..." is technically (in)correct. Most flashcarts before DSi came out had their own icon title and description that showed up in DS and DS lite menu and they worked fine. DSi changed this with very, VERY heavy handed anti piracy measure where ALL of the DS titles that were released before DSi launched were white listed in system firmware of DSi. To fool this, flashcart manufacturers had to use barely illegal amount of game metadata to fool DSi specifically to boot their card, which nintendo also countered with more updates, and flashcart manufacturers countered with new updates. This trend though helped to push flashcart sales more underground because what was before completely legal product to sell and buy became now partially pirated software on cart and was bigger no-no to anyone wanting to try sell their stock. I am personally unsure which was the vector; whitelisted games or new games after DSi released that included unique header and security info just for DSi systems. DS and lite to this day run anything you put into their slot. 2: Praising GBArunner. It is good, great, absolutely mad given what it actually is instead of emulation, which is somehow getting DS-mode to run GBA software "natively". This said, if you give it right and compatible game, yes all is good, but give it a too big game, or just a game more advanced if you will and it will break down or not run at all, slow down, sprite flicker and whatever else - and updated do not change this it has been left where it stands for couple of years. Also joke about eliminating people's purchase back in 2010-2015 by software that was released mostly after DSi hacking took off, which in itself took off from 3DS hacking is being a bit cheeky. It is great but it is not perfect, just try mother 3 or something like that. Slightly adding; Mother 3 has audio issues with lagged playback of effects and a lot of crackle in audio and crashing to black screen after the intro, at least for me. Rhythm Heaven also becomes unplayable because of the audio issues, laggy sound effects do not fly and some music breaks down entirely with mishmatched timing in elements of music making it sound - wild. Karate Man is unplayable just because the SFX gets played back late. Shin Megami Tensei GBA version does not save and attempting to play Mother 1+2 just crashed the whole DS not just the game. - Which is to say; Do not dump your perfectly good GBA emulator or 3DS GBA converts, you will miss them very fast if you plan to play more than two completely compatible games, and even though there is no updates I wasted a lot of time testing these second time to make sure they happen consistently, and they do. GBA slot flashcart is still what you'd want for DS or use more powerful device with full fledged emulator, or convert your legal backups into 3DS GBA Virtual Console titles and play them that way. Couple notable homebrew things I remember: Colors! for DS. This was very great drawing suite for DS and even used DS/lite's pressure sensitivity of the screen for simulating brush pressure. This tool is actually upgraded and available officially for 3DS and I think iPhone too, at some point? The 3DS version does not have pressure sensitivity as that was removed from DSi onwards, and no game officially is pressure sensitive, it is mostly just a hardware quirk I think that was exposed and usable on older DS models. Crayon physics was also great. It combines drawing with 2D physics toys or goldberg machines and is great fun especially for younger me. Also note from smuggler to another, and you may think you don't need it before you see it's results: TRIM YOUR ROMS. All ROM dumps of DS games are in full sizes of the ROM used, so 4mb up to 512mb. The actual game data though does not fill this but "The Scene" seemed to deem always full dumps, and it is left to smugglers and third party PC tools to "trim" the unused bits from ROM files. It usually is not much but some edge cases can trim even 100 megabytes from 256 or 512 roms that were not filled completely. You will still save collectively good few megabytes and given DS flashcarts do not officially go further than 16 gigs, saving space can be useful. You can also use now TWiLightMenu++ on many DS flashcarts that was initially made as 3DS DS mode menu, as this with other things (NDS-bootstrap) lets homebrew 3DS and DSi consoles run games and homebrew from the internal SD card with better-than-GBARunner compatibility. A hacked 3DS can do most of DS homebrew stuff through this but some homebrew will not work. Rip TGM-DS compatibility. Oh yeah someone cloned the third Tetris Grandmaster game for DS and it is *illegally* good.

I wanna see Wii U or 3DS modding next. I know, Wii modding is easier (I guess) and also that Homebrew channel song, but you already showed it a few times.

2:34 “idk how to make music” proceeds to make a masterpiece

I grew up with the R4, when I was like 4 my Dad called me and my sister down cellar and asked us to pick games to download, then sometime later he gave us each an R4. Then at like 10, I learnt how to add my own games to it and added a bunch of emulators and ROM hacks. Played through the entirety of Super Mario Bros 3 MIX on it. Great times.

I have a few DS flashcarts with two main things I use it for. One, I have a piece of software that allows for the backup and restoration of both saves and the ability to legally back up ROMS from GBA carts in the second slot (For the DS/DS Lite). And two, one of them has an inbuilt switch to assist in one method of modding 3DSes, which I do quite often

Btw, for the DSi, you can softmod the console so you don't need a flashcart, just an SD card with the right files and all your game cart backups.

I had the Datel Games n Music card, which was designed to run homebrew and play music. With the SD slot you could load all sorts of homebrew, but not pirated games. I used that thing a ton for homebrew, videos, music, and emulators. I also had the GBA Movie Player cartridge, which had a CompactFlash slot for additional homebrew storage. There were programs that could use either card for file access and I remember trying to write my own file manager as well to move files between the SD and CF cards.

funfact that 3D portal homebrew was made by smealum, who would later pretty much kickstart the entire 3DS hacking scene (also making an enhanced port of his Portal homebrew to the 3DS)

You’re fast becoming my favourite guy to watch on KZfaq. Keep up the quality content

Fantastic video. I absolutely love the DS, I've dedicated my entire life to modding and making homebrew for it. A slight correction about GBARunner2, it's not emulation but an hypervisor, the GBA code is ran natively (with a few caveats) using the DS hardware! If you want to check something out, try Super Mario Galaxy DS (which i helped making) from Jesse and CTGP Nitro (MKDS mod)

Flipnote studio was one of the best "Games" i have ever played as a child

The timebomb can also be bypassed by installing YSMenu as the kernel instead of whatever garbage they tell you as the software is typically what actually does the fake bricking to the cart.

Hey I actually have a Supercard DSTWO and I LOVED that cart. Hands down one of the best carts on the market. It deserves a video on its own because of how different it was to most. For one, the CPU (in a DS card wtf?) allowed for GBA AND SNES emulation. It had some really good features which included live game pausing, savestates, and a live decompiler and action replay if I remember correctly.

also an interesting thing is flashcarts arent the only ds cart to use a microsd card there are carts called dsision that were officially licensed and let you download movies and stuff to a microsd also on 3ds you can use a real cart with an ir sensor in it (heart gold, soul silver, black, white, black 2, white 2 theres more but theyre really finicky about it) and twilightmenu to play the games with ir ability

Maybe rose tinted glasses, but I don't remember that the DS had bad 3D controls for looking up. Sure it suffers because you could only use either of the shoulder buttons as your single action button but that's different. I remember playing Metroid Prime Hunters and later Dementium 1 & 2 and having a blast.

Also shouts to Jens for making the Colors! app and utilize the pen sensetivity function of the DS/DS lite touch screens.

i bought myself a DS flash cart a few months ago, and i regret not getting one sooner! it's worth owning just to play the fan translation for ace attorney investigations 2 (it's called prosecutor's path if you're interested); that translation is done so seamlessly that it feels like an official release oh and if you have a soft-modded wii lying around, there's a piece of homebrew (very creatively) called the Wii DS ROM Sender, which you can use to turn your wii into a DS demo kiosk that sends out demo ROMs for download play (something you used to be able to do with the Nintendo Channel back in the day, and something that a few games can do as well!)

Time bomb carts can also be subverted with custom firmware. Since the flash carts are all clones of each other, there are basic customer firmwares that work.

Wait, there are people who have an issue with downloading roms and emulating older games? I choose to not pirate current gen games but everything else is fair game

To be honest, I don’t know much about music production in general and this is all way over my head. *Proceeds to drop the sickest beat I’ve ever heard*

Not only is the ds game cart in the thumbnail shown to be inserted into the ds the wrong way. The micro sd card is also shown to be inserted the wrong way as well.

1:35 THAT'S MY SHOP LISTING LMAO! I took that photo 😂

I did not expect to see Altered Platinum in this video! So far, I've only ever seen it when I searched for it specifically... I would appreciate credit- either in a credits section or the description, alongside credit for the Mario Kart DS hack you showed- but it's still awesome! This was a pretty great video too. I still have a couple of old flashcarts and DSes, which I sometimes use to play my hack and others on the go. It's still a surreal experience to see my hack running on an actual DS, even after several years of development.

I was incredibly surprised to see a gateway blue card pop up in the wild again! I have a gateway modded launch 3ds i used to play all my games on before things like luma came out and i never saw someone else with one, so seeing it here is pretty cool.

I love how old the ds is and how smoothly it still runs.

I had a DS flash cart when I was young. Now, I've got a DSI I modded in 2019 using the new exploit. Also, a 2DS I modded a few years later to play games I download from a website for free.

if you own a 3DS or DSi, you don't need a R4 card, If you download TwiLight Launcher, it's basically the same thing but better in every way.

I bought a DS Lite on a Black Friday just for plugging in an R4 and an EZ Flash for the GBA slot and running Japanese games. In particular for Heartcatch PreCure DS games. Tamago-chi It's pronounced with a long O. The firmware I use for my R4 is by Yellow Wood Goblin last time I checked and it works seamlessly with the GBA EZ Flash cartridge in the other slot. I hope that sidesteps the time bomb if my R4 has one.

so many consoles have shine so bright at the end of their era. "a star always shine bright before it dies" - no one ever.

GBArunner2 is not actually GBA emulation, it's a backwards compatibility hypervisor. The games are still run natively on the DS's CPU and the only thing special it really does is redirecting the calls that would normally be to the cartridge port to the wrong file on your SD card.

As someone who was there just have to name a few of the greats; Tetris the Grandmaster: Shirace, Lemmings, Still Alive, Lockjaw, Scummvm, Aguna, Colors (fun fact, the DS has pressure sensitivity on the touch screen, the dsi and 3ds would have this disabled later) and Moonshell, Also hearing you mention slot 2 loading, god... that takes me back to the nightmare that was rom patching and pass-through, Also lol the Gateway getting in is a funny choice as it was a very special pair of cards that has a history with the early days of 3ds homebrew.

The DS homebrew scene was my favorite era. I was deeply involved in the M3 scene back during the best years

The thing is, most old games are not being sold anymore thus, don't go to the copyright holders. Honestly, at that point, I don't shed too many years if people pirate the game. I also don't think sharing roms/software should be illegal either, but that might just be me.

Was expecting a real DS game with a SD Card Slot, but it's about flashcards

I'm considering making a second screen accessory for the steam deck so that you can play Wii U/3DS/dsi/ds games the way it was intended to be played on the far superior hardware.

The DS Port of Lemmings was my favourite homebrew port, but I actually used the moknshell2 launcher to just read books on the go too!

what about the 3DS homebrew scene? it's still pretty active and since it has better controls (esp with the two joystick new 3DS), it has a bigger variety of games. my favourite is the hl1 port

my older brothers had the r4 ones. Also funny thing is that they thought they would get the 3ds but the got the ds lite which is kinda funny for their reaction 😄

I had a GBA port (slot 2) flashcart before the slot 1 ones got widely available. And yeah it was pretty jank for running legit games but it was a powerhouse for homebrew. The extra RAM and fast disk access helped a lot with a lot of things. Played a bunch of Quake on there.

“You don’t need to mod your DS” Me who has a modded DSi so I can load things from built in SD card slot without a flash cart: uhhh…

3ds next. The most feature rich homebrew device

idk if this is just nostalgia talking, but the ds/3ds family have to be my favorite systems to play on. so so soooo many fantastic titles, plus the ability to emulate games from many retro consoles. dses arent the most powerful handhelds, even when they were released they werent, but that didnt stop developers from creating so many fantastic and creative titles.

I actually liked playing COD on the DS lite. I didn't find the controls bad or anything for a 3d game. I remember back in the day on the jungle map (and a few others) you could gitch into the map and just shoot across the map, through the map etc, good memories. Def gonna fix my old ones hinge now. Had no idea portal was on there (both those versions you showed). Now if you played on the Wii you are a different type of monster.

"Welcome, the game" I forgot I was playing, and now I've lost. And you have too. What have you done?!

I love how in the thumbnail the SD card is clearly upside down to go into the DS cart

I had quite a few of those. PAR, R4, Supercard CF GBA, and one other CF adapter I forgot it's name. Times were tough but also fun.

I RELATE SO MUCH TO THAT BEGINNING OH MY GOD I got my ds lite and then the next time i went to the stores there was the brand new shiny dsi ... and it got worse when they released the black and white pokemon dsi. oh how badly i wanted that one...

It angers me console homebrew isn’t common knowledge

gbarunner2 is not an emulator. It is a hypervisor accessing the actual Game Boy advance hardware on the console. Fun fact; It is the only way you can play GBA games on a DSi, which still features the hardware but no slot. 3DS has its own separate mode for GBA which the homebrew community has already fully(ish) optimized

I remember my dad found a R4CARD at the dump he works for and I played all 600 games that was on that 🤣

Quake plays Fantastic on the DS and runs at full 60 fps most of the time. I'm also glad that you showed Nitrotracker. It is awfully underappreciated. There's also a music player that looks like ipod.

I thought the title woulda been: "Some DS Games Have an SD Card Slot, And This is Why: Piracy"

These were a godsend on under developed countries that games are too expensive. I still have my DSTT with a few games and it still works

I remember getting my random R4 off Amazon in like 2016. Enjoyed getting back into the DS library, although its biggest contribution for me was modding my 3DS so I could do portable emulation. Wildest thing when I was deep into DS homebrew was that Quake was a more mature port than Doom at the time. QuakeDS is a seriously impressive DS port.

I remember buying our DS xl off a kid and it came with a 1001 in 1 cart

i’m a kid who missed out on games actual games because my dad had a friend who gave me an EDGE homebrew flashcart, still a fantastic cart that works 10 years later and i was able to add a lot more games when i found it

Me not knowing a damn thing about Homebrew and how emulation works: These are some cool words magic man.

That dude on Reddit has not been part of a car modding community, have they? You bet your butt it would still be called a Corvette even with a Ferrari engine just like an LS swapped Supra is still a Supra.

I still have my R4DS in my DS Lite, and yes the DS battery still has some charge left after years of non-use

Those cards were so abundant that when I bought a DS on Craigslist in 2012 it came with an R4.

If you do get an r4 card I personally recommend installing twilight menu on it because it disables the timebomb

I literally I have an R4 that came out of nowhere, I think some kid dropped it on the street, my parents found it, and took it home because they know I'm kinda gamer, I don't even own Ds or 3Ds, they just thought it could be useful, so yeah, can't keep them away.

I have a Chibirobo rom which is a game that only released in Japan and is kind of a continuation of first Chibi Robo in the Gamecube

It's always morally correct to plunder and sail across the vast sea of DS roms

Technically, the Supercard DSTwois still kind of needed for SNES games as it has hardware inside the cartridge to rum them, so it's not entirely useless.

First thing to do with any electronic is to Google and find out if it can be homebrewed, jail broken, or rooted.

While GBA emulation is okay on the DS it's not a full replacement for a slot 2 flashcart. There's wide incompatibility and several games that don't emulate well. (Off the top of my head Golden Sun and its sequel don't emulate well). This is also an issue with the DSTwo.

Wait what?! I had no idea my DS was so old! I STILL play on it!

7:54 Seeing an NTR-Aging cartridge on a video like this genuinely caught me off guard

I get the joke about picking a random translated game, but Super Robot Wars W was a great one to have shouted out.

To be honest, the Pokéwalker is like Pokémon GO today.

Shout-out to the uncles hooking the whole family up with R4 cards

the thumbnail hurts me physically (microsd orientation)

WOW I HEAR UNDERATED SPIRIT TRACKS MUSIC!

Holy shit nitrotracker on the DS brings me back to my DS homebrew days. The app DSOrganize had a built in IRC client and that's where I made many friends I still have to this day.

The thumbnail is haunting

I had one of those R4 clones back in the day (at the end of the DS's lifecycle. That one had a random game pop up in the main menu. My original R4, CycloDS Evolution, and Edge flashcarts all had their original logos pop up in the menu.

Love your channel dude! Can't wait for it to hit 100K. Keep up the awesome work. Also 7:54 had me laughing so hard dude :D

jesus christ that reddit screenshot is on some massive copium cringe

Note: GBARunner is not an emulator. It's more like Nintendon't on the Wii, in the sense that it uses the hardware's native GBA compatibility.

Dude that portal port seems better than the graphics that should of been available.

"Homebrew" Fwiw, a CycloDS and EZflash 3 in 1 slays all other carts. And I've used them all.