There's a COMPUTER inside my DS flashcart [video] | Hacker News Reader

There's a COMPUTER inside my DS flashcart [video]

youtube.com

64 pointssurprisetalk13 comments

Dreamcast memory cards (VMU - Visual Memory Unit) [1] were mini handheld gaming consoles with an 8-bit Sanyo LC8670 CPU and a monochrome screen. Some Dreamcast games let you "download" mini games into the memory card and play them independent of the main console.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VMU

There were a lot of cool homebrew games and animations for VMUs too

I've been playing around with an esp32 SD card for similar retrofits: https://github.com/FYSETC/SD-WIFI-PRO

Nice project! I have a couple of the Transcend SD-WIFI cards in my studio - one thing that I really like about them, is the Lua-based interface that allows programmatic control, remotely, of the filesystem. This has been quite useful.

Do you have any plans to support similar functionality?

I actually have this flashcart. The issue with it is that it drains a heap of battery, so it's not ideal if you're just playing NDS stuff.

I also tried to fit the entire DS game library on an SD card for this flashcart, and the main challenge was figuring out how to organise the files so that it wouldn't crash the cart.

Basically you can't have everything in the one folder cause I think it tries to load everything all at once, so I had to separate it by a-z. And even then, I think I've limited to around 100 files per folder.

I also had this flashcard, I remember that the part where the CPU was located would get slightly warm after using it for a while.

It was funny because the CPU was so tall that the cartridge case had a cutout for it, otherwise the case would not close.

I would be fun to compare it to the Apollo computers. I assume it has much more computing power which also highlights just how crazy efficient they were back in the day with such limited computing power.

In the age of "Doom on a Pregnancy Tester!", I don't even click on this kind of stuff any more. Sorries!

While the Doom stuff seems like it's kinda soulless attempts at e-cred, this is more interesting because 1) it's an old/historical product (SuperCard DSTWO) that was actually in use rather than something someone made recently and 2) it was made with functionality in mind rather than showing off for the sake of it. Specifically it allowed SNES and I think GBA emulation on a system that would normally be way too weak for it. I remember hearing the chip in this flashcart was roughly equivalent to a PSP. I had one back in the 2010s and it remained useful even with a 3DS as for years you couldn't run DS games off the SD card on 3DS, and I think trying to emulate SNES/GBA on 3DS was also not great. Later on this flash cart became less desirable than the more basic DS-only ones because it had a big power draw even when not being actively played (IIRC), so if you left it in your 3DS and played digital 3DS games it was an extra drain.

I will agree, though, with the general Doom sentiment as well as the clickbait title. Seeing the description say it was the SuperCard DSTWO restored my faith.

These days with TWiLightMenu, a DSi or 3DS doesn't have much use for this flashcart, or any other, but it remains useful for a DS Phat/Lite.

OK, I take back my shallow dismissal and am looking into it. :)

There should be at least one comment for every article that explains what one should look at. A link is not enough.

f4mi's channel isn't so bad... it's a little click-baity sometimes, but I often get a kick out of Gen-Z's amusement when dealing with technology just before their time.

I’d go as far as to say that f4mi’s channel is quite excellent. And her production quality and writing is top tier.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com