Hacking Alternative places to find WoodR4/Acekard2 themes?

[Apache Thunder]

It seems the main site "ndsthemes" isn't working because every theme I downloaded has a file size of 0kb or 20kb which means I get corrupt zip/rar files that won't extract. So I can't download anything!

Anyone know where to find this theme mirrored somewhere?

http://www.ndsthemes.com/themes/details/t/4334570c6f

The one Miku theme I want and I can't download it.

I've tried IE, Chrome, and Firefox and all of them end up downloading 0KB files from that site. It seems the site is just plain broken.

The forum they have hasn't seen activity since 2012 (at least in the site feedback section, I haven't looked elsewhere), I decided to ask about this here.

Secondary question, what's the best way of checking if my R4 is real? It's not really important since I bought it from RealHotStuff because of the low price. Otherwise I would have gone for the DSTwo which I used to own prior to selling my original DS a few years back. But if it happens to be real, that would be great. Otherwise I suppose it's not a big deal since it seems to work fine and WoodR4 works on it, so no problems with it. It seems to have a sturdy construction (doesn't feel flimsy) and doesn't have a spring loaded SD card slot, so that's another thing I won't have to worry about braking on me.

I disassembled it and it does NOT have a large chip hiding under the sticker. I can provide photos later if needed. Perhaps there's a homebrew app that can check this thing?

 

[Technicmaster0]

I would have said that you should look at the Acekard website but it seems to be down. You can get some skins on the bottom of R4ids.cn's download page: http://r4ids.cn/r4i-download-e.htm. In addition to that, you can download some backuped skins from the Acekard website: https://web.archive.org/web/20120503025415/http://www.acekard.com/skin.php?&p=9.

Does the latest Wood run with your card? Is it from r4ids.cn or r4idsn.com? It should be nice if it is.

 

[Apache Thunder]

Yep latest wood version runs fine. Was able to play Pokemon Black 2 and did not have issues with the AP measure the game has which was one of the factors that made me choose the R4 given my limited budget.

I bought the R4 from RealHotStuff.com (since it was a US based seller, shipped it to me in 2 days flat even though it was just First Class shipping. ) The "description" for the R4 on their website says it's "Original Authentic", but we all know not to believe everything on the internet. Whether or not it was real wasn't part of my buying decision, so it's irrelevant, but a bonus to me if it was real since I've heard they are rare due to being out of production.

 

[Apache Thunder]

Oh and there's a realhotstuff.hk for those near the Asia region, so you don't have to buy from their US seller, but instead get them shipped out from China via the Hong Kong website.

Alright here's some photos of the R4 I got:

And this is a hex edit screenshot of the internal rom stored on the R4. (dumped via NDS Backup Tool, the resulting file size was around 16 megabytes)

This flashcart auto boots when the DS powers on, so it's impossible to see it's name/icon in the NDS menu (even holding down start/select gets ignored or setting boot behavior to manual. ) I can view it in a NDS file editor if I want, but for now here's the header from the hex editor view of it:

The camera I used has had the IR filter removed so the colors "might" be slightly off. Though the LED flashlight I used to illuminate the area did improve things.

EDIT:

I viewed the dumped rom with a rom tool and it doesn't contain a valid icon. (all green). I put it in my CodeBreaker cart (as with that, I can get it to boot without auto booting) and viewed it's icon from the Codebreaker menu. It shows up all black. So banner info seems to not really be valid. Not sure if the original R4 was like this too, so someone needs to let me know about that.

Also found this:

http://en.r4-revolution.com/fake_r4_cartidges

Judging from the image comparisons (you'll need to read the text near the thumbnails to know which one is the fake as the text in the photos is in Chinese/Japanese) mine has a 80% chance of being real. But the packaging is likely not original. The very first version of the R4 came in a white shell with a spring loaded SD card slot.

However these are probably the most rare of the two. There was a second revision "R4v2" that changed to a black color and no longer used spring mechanism. Mine lines up with that for the most part and the number stamp on the chip is below 0817# as that photo indicated anything larger then that is fake.

Perhaps the only way to know is for someone to drop by who has bought a real R4 (version 2) from when they were still being produced or bought them from a person they trust and know for sure it was real.

So if you are one of said individuals, let me know if you think mine looks anything like your real one. Perhaps even dump the internal rom for me and send it to me in a PM. I can compare them to see if there's any difference as well.

Another thing to know. It displays "Loading..." in large white text on the top screen centered on a black background upon startup. It boots pretty quick, so it doesn't stick around very long. It has a message in similar font (white colored large text on a single line centered on black background) that displays "Couldn't Find the SD/TF card" when booted without a SD card inserted.

If the _DS_MENU.DAT file is removed (to simulate a blank SD card basically), it will instead display "Couldn't find _DS_MENU.DAT" in large white text taking up only one line centered on black background.

So let me know if the genuine R4 gives off similar error messages. But to be clear I artificially induced those errors as my card has been 100% stable from one day of use. It has yet to ever fail to read the SD card, or fail to boot for any reason.


UPDATE:

After looking through the Acekard site with WayBack machine and after a few hours of doing other stuff, I suddenly realized I could do the same for NDSThemes website.

I don't know why I hadn't tried this earlier, but I ran that Miku Theme from NDSThemes website through that WayBack machine website. So appearently I can download themes from that site via Wayback machine. Got that Miku theme which is a lot better then the other one I found. Got what I was looking for. So now the only question remaining is the authenticity of my R4.