How can you make your purchase of your Nintendo DS Cheap? Well if you count up the price of the Nintendo Handheld Console then add on the price of the 2 or 3 DS games that you want to accompany the Nintendo handheld Console you are talking a lot of money.
One way that a lot of people are getting round this to enable them to purchase their Nintendo DS Cheap is the use of what are called ‘moonshell’ cards. These cards come in many forms and started off with the introduction of the r4 card that supported upto 2 gig of micro sd memory.
The origional R4 card sold in the hundreds of thousands and by the end of 2007 the stocks were so scarse that stock could not be found anywhere. The price at the time was around $60 (£40). Since that time many clone of the R4 have appeared in the form of the R5, N5, R6 and as of late the R4 pro and advanced, which are not actually made by the same people that produced the R4.
People still have to be carefull with these cards however, as after the release of the N5 card; lots of people found that after inserting into their Nintendo Handheld Console that it actually over loaded one of the internal Handheld DS capacitors and blew it. This rendered the users Nintendo Handheld Consoles bricked and unusable.
These card have been produced to enable home made moon shell games and software applications to be ran on the Nintendo Handheld Console itself. Simply load the firmware then add your moonshell software to the root then boot up and away you go as they say.
In reality though what these cards actually do is bypass the rom protection on the HandHeld Nintendo Console and play downloaded rom games from numerous torrent and other peer to peer sites.
The legality of these card is in dispute however, as current law enable you to have backup copies of your purchased electronic media as is the case with Computer games, DVD and CD’s that you buy. So you could simply download the games you have and put these on a single card for convenience.
However, in reality due to the over priced games many people simply buy the cards and download the games that they want for minimal costs. How could nintendo combat this? Well the obvious solution would be to reduce the price of games to a level that people would not mind buying them.
Another way that nintendo will clamp down for furture console is with the introduction of the new DSi that is due for release in the US and Europe in the spring. This will contain regioned software compatibility as well as other anti-piracy features but as with most of the consoles and chipping technologies it will only be a matter of time before a similar card is released.
At the present time the price of the NDS cards for the Handheld Nintendo has dramatically dropped and even the best of the current batch of NDs cards is only at a lowly $17 (£11). But what is recommended to buy if you are going to buy one to ensure that it will not damage the Handheld DS?
Well the best card aroud at present is the Edge DS card and includes the ability to play video and mp3 files on your console. How cool is that!! Pretty cool I say.. But where do people get such cards from?
Most people seem to purchase their cards from a hong kong based company called ‘deal-extreme’ (www.deal-extreme.com) who ship the goods for free; though from reports they do seem to take around 10-12 days from purchase to delivery. Though how far you would trust memory cards from the site is another issue. Most people purchasing the cards seem to buy the micro sd cards that are required to run the software from places like play.com or amazon.
