Hacking Best R4 clone

[Forte Dante]

i have the r4-iii. have had it for several months now. i absolutly love it. no problems with it and would recommend it to anyone.
the problems with these forums is all the ignorant people who bash a card that they know nothing about. i have seen this same topic with the same responces in other forums.

if you dont have the r4-iii dont tell me that it does not work or that it will brick my ds. it does work and after months of use my ds still works.

exactly how long do you clones think that it will take for it to brick my ds.

anyway latest firmware is 3.06 released on november 6th 2008, so there goes the argument that support for it will die with the death of the real r4. rumor is that the r4-iii was created by the same developers that created the real r4 when they left the company they used the name r4-iii to get the attention of people. do not know if there is any truth to this or not but have read in more than one forum.

so to anyone looking for a good flash cart that simply plays nds games without patching, runs emulators without patching, works with moonshell 1.7 then this is a choice i would recommend. it does have built in cheat support, and gba loader. it does not have built in slow motion but i dont need or want that anyway.

Just because its worked well for you does not mean it has worked well for everyone. Think a little and consider the fact that not everyone suffers the same problems just because they bought the same card, but to someone who's buying a new card it wouldn't be worth the risk compared to buying a card which NO ONE has complained about bricking.

 

[nathan38401]

no one has complained about this card bricking their ds. that is the point, this card will not brick the ds, but all of you clones keep repeating that it will. point me to one forum of a user who has had the r4-iii brick his or her ds. ive yet to see one.

 

[TrolleyDave]

Point us to one person who said it WILL brick your card.

The bricking rumours came from the R4 team who said they were going to be releasing a firmware that would brick your card if you tried to use it on a clone. The firmware never materialized because the R4 team broke up.

NONE, and I repeat NONE, of the clone cards are made by the R4 Team. They're just rumours started by the cloners so that people feel safer buying the cards. How much actual experience, besides buying a clone card, do you have with flashcarts?

And what makes you so certain that nobody here has experience with the card? There are people here who have experience with most of the cards available on the market and that's where GBAtemps info comes from.

 

[nathan38401]

i have several months experience with this clone card after buying a clone card. i would recomend this cart to anyone. that is the topic of this forum post anyway ( best r4 clone card). and to say that no one said that a clone cart would brick your ds just for the sake of it being a clone card, did you not read all of the post in this thread from the first to the last? anyway. if we are still on the same topic i have not tried anyother r4 "clones" (this card is only a clone in name, has completly different (upgraded better) hardware than r4 and uses its own firmware ) but i would as i stated earlier recommend this card. it works.

 

[junk_man32]

Ok, seeing as how the R4 looks pretty dead, there will prolly be a lot more people buying "fake", "clone", or whatever R4 cards.

Your BEST bet is to buy another card as support for these cards may or may not exist. Internally most are quite different to the original R4, but appear to use hacked/edited original R4 loaders. These "new" R4s are definately not clones, rip offs of the original yes. Most of the rumors about them bricking your DS are either about the 9/15 R4 firmware(vaporware) threat, or most likely the N5 and it's faulty SD reader shorting and blowing a fuse.

This is probably not the best choice in the world, but for those that dont see other cards as being the best bet, this thread might be of use. Don't expect them to play the newest games, work with over 4GB cards (rumors of some not even doing that). And only buy one if this is a hobby to you, and you know what you are buying.

If you own an N5 already, follow THIS LINK and fix it before putting the MicroSD into the cart too many times. (DO NOT buy this card if you dont wanna fix it 1st)

I purchased an R4-III from r4dusa.com
It was payed for with paypal and shipped fast. They are based in southern California and the support is good (I had also bought a "Fat Error" Acekard2 from them and dealing with "Anthony Peccon" has been ok so far)

I've had the R4-III for quite some time now, it's hardware is definately an "upgrade", it does support 4GB SDHC.
UPDATE: Just got an 8GB card in, filled it to 4GB, then copied some music then games to it, in moonshell the music i copied under the 4GB mark played... the few over the mark crashed moonshell. The Games3 folder(above 4GB mark) was unreadable. So while fully working with the 4GB MicroSDHC this card (III) DOES NOT SUPPORT OVER 4GB.

It appears to be updated often at http://www.r4dsl.net/index-en.asp with the last update being to v3.03 on 9/11/2008. It does everthing listed and has given my 3 year old no issues to date. I have had it in all 4 of our DSs at one time or another and none have came away bricked (used it to put FlashMe on all we own)

Anyone else have /this/ card and have anything to say good or bad about it?

Also, how about commenting on your R4 clone in this thread? (please no hearsay or rumors unless you claim it as such)

UPC Database entries:
R4

 

[TrolleyDave]

i have several months experience with this clone card after buying a clone card. i would recomend this cart to anyone. that is the topic of this forum post anyway ( best r4 clone card). and to say that no one said that a clone cart would brick your ds just for the sake of it being a clone card, did you not read all of the post in this thread from the first to the last? anyway. if we are still on the same topic i have not tried anyother r4 "clones" (this card is only a clone in name, has completly different (upgraded better) hardware than r4 and uses its own firmware ) but i would as i stated earlier recommend this card. it works.

So you only have experience with 1 particular card. You'd recommend the card because it's the only one you have experience with, whereas most here would recommend another card entirely because we have experience with a wide range of them. There are much better cards available with a guaranteed future with support from an active development team and they're available at either roughly the same cost or less.

Clone is really the wrong word for the card, it's become a generic term for rip-off flashcarts because originally they were literally that, one for one component ripoffs - only the components were cheaper and the card was built more shoddily. It's still the same with these cards, only instead of clones they should really be refered to as counterfeit. They're not one for one component rip offs BUT they do function exactly the same hardware wise - it's just they're made out of cheaper components. Have you ever compared the quality of a real R4 to a counterfeit. There's a big difference.

As for the people mentioning that a clone card WILL brick your DS, what they're refering to is the N5. Which WILL pop the fuse in your in the DS at some point. That's not just peple ripping into a card because it's a counterfeit, it's a well documented fact. There is a design fault with the N5, there's plenty of documented evidence about it. Hell, DX even have a fix guide in their advert for it.

It doesn't actually use it's own firmware. It's a hacked version of the original firmware, and the ones that don't use the hacked version of the original version of the R4 loader use a ripped off version of YSMenu from Yasu. Again, this isn't just people going "oh it's a clone it's bad", it's people who've actually taken the time to look into it who have extensive knowledge and experience with DS flashcarts, most of them have experience going back to when only Slot 2 solutions were available.

 

[AeroHex]

i think the work for the dude that posted this is "pissoff" why would you buy crap on crap

r4 is the worst experience I've had with slot 1 cards

i got my r4 about when 1.18 was just around i didn't sees its release even

 

[Dark^'^Knigh]

Yeah, what Beve/Hexane26/Aerohex said....wait, what did he say?

BTW, you've still got SCDS1 to let you down in the short term, and then iTouch...

 

[nathan38401]

ok since this tread has gone in a different direction from what it was intended to be, i will ask everyone what is your primary card and what are its features. also does it work with clean drag and drop, no arm7 patches or dldi patches. i know that most now do, but someone convince me why my r4-iii is not any good, tell me what im missing, maybe the cyclos is so much better, i dont know. someone enlighten me (and dont say slo-mo, that is not a reason for me )

 

[TrolleyDave]

My primary card used to be an official R4. I bought one when they were's still 30 quid and where the top of the line card. I only replaced it like 3 months ago when more and more stuff kept coming out that wasn't compatible. I really liked the card but it had no future.

I then bought an EDGE and a DSTT to see which I prefered, and settled on the EDGE. I'd thought about getting an Acekard 2 but there were too many reports of failures so didn't. Then the AK2.1 came out and it was pretty damned cheap so I picked one up. It's a really good card with the single most feature rich firmware I've seen called AKAIO.

I've been using it for a few days now. It has an amazing amount of features in it, including built in 3-in-1 support for GBA loading, rumble and web browsing. It's really fast, looks nice and has a windows style start button for selecting your options. Loading from the cart is alot faster than the R4 and of course it's more compatable. The card feels a little flimsy but no more flimsy than most coarts. It's a very good choice of cart and it's also a little bit cheaper than most of the R4 clones.

The DSTT has a horrible native loader. Loads of people really like it but I don't. It's slow and doesn't allow for good organization. If you use YSMenu however it's an excellent card. YSMenu looks and feels like the R4 firmware except with more. It's not as skinnable as the real R4 loader, but it offers fast browsing, you can organize stuff into folders and built in 3-in-1 support which the official loader doesn't. The card build quality is decent too, not great but decent. Sometimes I get sticking problems when taking it out of/putting it in the DS. Nothing major but still.

The EDGE is what I use as my main card normally. It has a really nice looking loader, not as nice as AKAIO but still very nice. There are multiple options for styles of viewing your file lists, with an option icon and full game name. It's the fastest card I've used so far. It offers full compatability again, well apart from then new Star Wars game. it also offerns built in 3-in-1 support for rumble and browsing, you still need to use GBA_ExpLoader to load your GBA games. The build quality is great on the EDGE. It's sturdy, feels nice and fits flush in the DS.

None of the above cards need any kind of patching to get stuff to run and they all also offer full cheat file support.

 

[juntok_abot]

invest for ACEKARD 2 or CYCLODS
mine SCDS1+YSMENU