EurAsia - DS-X Review by bLAStY

Introduction
=====================================================
I welcome you all to one of the worlds first DS-X reviews, exclusively for EurAsia.nu. This review will cover all the features of the new DS-X flashcart solution, but let me explain some things first. Before we start this review I would like to apologize for the poor picture quality, the camera I had at the moment wasn't the best one around, and I 'm a very poor photographer.

* What is the DS-X?

Quote from the DS-X Team:
"The DS-Xtreme is a revolutionary storage, homebrew and media player flash cart compatible with all DS Lite and original DS consoles."

The DS-X is a SLOT-1 based device, which means it plugs into the NDS cart slot, and is not a GBA slot based solution. It comes packed with a 4GBit (512 MegaBytes) flashchip where you store all your goodies. Theoretically the DS-X should let you be able to run any DS homebrew, listen/watch your media and (possibly) play commercial NDS games too. (They don't mention it anywhere)

We have seen some more SLOT-1 based NDS devices lately, and the first question that would pop to mind is: "Do I need to have flashme installed in order to use this?"

I'm happy to let you know that this is not the case. The DS-X is a so-called NoPass (© Pepsiman) device. Which basically means it mimics the cart encryption scheme of retail NDS cart and is a full standalone solution.

So far so good, I would like to start off with the guts.

Yes, it's very easy to open it up with the use of a simple scissor. ;-)

What's in the box?
========================================================
After a four hour sleep last night, I was woken up by a FedEx mail-guy this morning, who came to my cozy little town to deliver me the latest of DS flashcart gear. After opening the enveloppe and getting the (relatively) tiny DS-X box out of it, I was eager to find out what was inside. Well actually it was rather boring, a DS-X flashcart and a USB mini type-B cable. Well, no surprises there, but it's nice they included the cable.

I planned to not start ranting about the box's physical appearance in this review, but since some people seem to care about packaging, I will. It's is a small cardboard box and features a flip-top cover which allows you to get the stuff out of it.. (revolutionary indeed, hehe!)

The DS-X and it's box.

Physical size comparison with some other carts.

Basic Usage
========================================================
This device is so easy to use, even your lamest friends could do it. The DS-X features a USB mini type-B connector which you connect to your PC with the supplied cable. After that the DS-X is detected as a normal "removeable harddrive" in your favorite operating systems. I was curious if it was really _vanilla_ UMS so I tried on various linux boxes and a windows PC, and it did work! After the DSX is detected, you just copy your Media/ROMs/whatever over to the drive, and that's it. As mentioned already you have 512 megabytes to fill up with stuff.

Offcourse I had to find out what the transfer speeds are. So I did quick test using time(1) on my Linux box and got the following results:
* Write speed 12.53 seconds (64MB)
* Read speed 6.68 seconds (64MB)

Offcourse those results might vary depending on your operating system/USB chipset and the current system usage. The DS-X is formatted as FAT-16 by default, and there's no real need for FAT32 since the size is limited to 512MB anyway.

Thank you DS-X team, no patchers nor Operating System handicaps.

The brick of hashish doesn't fit in my NDS cart slot :-(

DS-X Connected to USB.

The DS-X OS
========================================================
After turning on my (flashme'd) NDS (lite) with the DSX inserted, I was greeted by the normal DS firmware with a nice DS-X icon for the game inserted in SLOT-1. This was the first thing that -kinda- surprised me, since some of the previous SLOT-1 based NoPass solutions I tried would freeze the DS on a flashme'd DS, and you had to hold SELECT during boot to prevent that from happening. This one didn't.

Then I selected the DS-X icon and I was presented with a "Loading.." screen which takes up to 3-4 seconds to get passed, a major downside if you ask me. I want to be able to access my stuff quickly, not wait every time.

The (short) wait was worth my time though, as I was presented by a nice menu which utilizes both screens. On the upper screen you see the big X logo of DS-X (X marks the spot, right?). The lower screen features 4 icons which are selectable using the keys on the DS, or the touch screen. The four menu items are: Apps, Music, Settings and About.

The Apps menu is used for launching your homebrew/games. The music menu is obviously for playing back your music (more on that later). The settings screen lets you set a few select options:

* Instant boot [on / off]
The instant boot option allows you to directly boot a NDS file from the filesystem and skip the menu alltogether.

* Dancing LEDs [on / off]
This option is a really nice extra! When you enable it and play some MP3, the two LED lights on the DS-X give you a nice lightshow. Pimp my flashcart indeed.

* Left LED R/G/B
Controls the RGB value of the left LED on the DS-X. (yes it has two tiny RGB leds on top, did I already mention it?! ;))

* Right LED R/G/B
Controls the RGB value of the right LED on the DS-X.

The DS-X settings screen.

The DS-X LEDs in action!

And finally there's the about screen which shows the current firmware revision and some support URL's.

On to the fun part of the OS. It's fully customize- and scriptable! While browsing the contents of the DSX on my computer, I found a folder with the default skin it. After fooling around with the XML files for 10 minutes I got bored of it and decided I wanted to change some of the graphics in the menu. There was 2 folders "textures" and "palettes" containing the graphics files. Sadly not in some common format, but a quick hexedit and some editting revealed it was just a normal RAW format. I've written a small tool to convert RAW RGB888 images to DS-X texture + palette format, but it's not really safe right now, so I'll release it later.

I'm looking forward to get some more official info on the workings of the script and XML files, so maybe we can see some nice GUI mods soon ;) Also, there's a fonts directory where the main font that is used in the DS-X OS is stored, as a normal TTF file. Offcourse I had to try and replace it with a custom one to see if it worked, and yes it did. Very nice feature if you ask me, since it supports TTF fonts.

Main functionality testing
========================================================
I could pretend to be the clueless fool, and tell you Media playback is the DS-X's main functionality, but offcourse it's not. We all know every new flashcart fabricated these days is aimed at piracy. It's not like anyone would pay > $100 for a device that just play backs media and homebrew when there's alternatives that are less then half of the price of DS-X.

Offcourse I didn't have the time to test my complete NDS RHOMZ (*wink*) collection, so I boiled it down to a few tests with games that gave problems in the past with other flashcart solutions.

* Pokemon Dash - Fully works.
* Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow - No lag in intro movie
* Final Fantasy III (JAP) - No lag in intro movie
* Ultimate Spiderman - Works perfectly, no lag/crashes.
* Pokemon Pearl/Diamon - Both white screen'd for me.. (OMG I WANT MUH POEKMONZ!1!! ;))

With that being said, we can conclude that commercial game compatibility is pretty good. I haven't found any game yet that wouldn't boot or save, except for pokemon. That brings me to the next point, saving.

Saving on the DS-X is done in a clever way (if you ask me). The DS-X cart has a hardware EEPROM like retail NDS cart have to hold the savegame. This makes you think: "What, I can only save one game??!". No, that's not the case. After you finished playing your game, and you turn your NDS off and on again, the hardware EEPROM is written back to a file on the DS-X filesystem. This is clever in the sense that the saving routines don't need to be patched, since it writes to the EEPROM directly like a normal game would. A problem that might arise in the future with this system is that Nintendo might enlarge the size of the internal EEPROM in the carts, which would render the DS-X's EEPROM to small. Offcourse this is nothing that can't be worked around using some patching :-)

So, commercial games compatibility is pretty good. But what about our favorite homebrew software? I took some time to find a some DS homebrews which all differ in a certain aspect. DS-X is said to feature a revolutionary way of dealing with builds of software that don't have support for the DS-X FAT filesystem. They hook the FAT cod`e and re-route the routines so it *does* work with them. Offcourse this is something I wanted to try out.

For this test I picked the following homebrew:
* Moonshell (Has compatibility for lots of devices, but no native DS-X support)
* TickleGirl (Uses appended ROMFS filesystem)
* NitroTracker v0.2 (Has compatibility for lots of devices, but no native DS-X support)
* DSOrganize (Has compatibility for lots of devices, but no native DS-X support)

As expected, TickleGirl didn't work, since it uses an appended filesystem which is meant to work with normal GBA carts. What disappointed me more was that NitroTracker v0.2 wasn't able to read any files on the FAT either. The old version of moonshell I tried wasn't able to read the FAT either. Sadly I didn't try with a newer moonshell since it wants you to run some win32 installer, which I am unable to at the moment.

DSorganize did work though, as pointed out in the video earlier released by the DS-X team.

But if you ask me, the whole FAT-lib-hooking-trick needs some polishment. I understand it's really hard to manage full compatibility for FAT-homebrews since there's been a lot of updates to the FAT driver by chishm, but I hope they will do something about it. Offcourse the DS-X team will release FAT drivers for developers later.

So far so good, all other homebrew that doesn't rely on any FAT devices seemed to work fine for me.

Additional functionality testing
========================================================
As advertised the DS-X also offers media playback capabilities. In the DS-X OS version I am testing as I'm writing this was limitted to an audio player and no native movie playback capabilities or whatsoever. The interface of the MP3 player reminded me a lot of that from an iPod.. No, not a click wheel on your touchscreen, but the listing of your music files is very similar. When you launch the MP3 player, it parses your whole filesystem, looking for audio files (MP3 or OGG). After that you are presented with a screen where you can sort your music by: "all songs", "artists", "albums", "genres". The info for artists etc. are extracted from the ID3 tags of the audio files, nice!

Sadly no more media capabilities in this OS version. But ah well, I guess we can expect them in the near future. Luckily, there's more!

Another nice extra feature included with the DS-X is that you can boot any device in the GBA slot (in NDS mode), so it acts like a normal NoPass such as Max Media Launcher too. I tried this myself with the following GBA-based solutions for NDS homebrew/piracy, and here are the results:

Supercard CF - Works flawlessly, booted straight into the SC menu.
GBA Movie Player (2nd edition) - Worked, but would fail with some files I had as _boot_mp.nds.. (works with flashme.nds though)
EZFA III GBA flashcart - Worked flawlessly, I tried it out with new super mario bros btw.

Conclusion
========================================================
Here it ends, my review of the DS-X 4Gbit flashcart. I never like advising people what flashcarts they should buy, so you have to judge for yourself by the stuff I mentioned in this review to decide if the DS-X is worth the bang for your buck. For me personally, I think it's a very nice and solid solution. From the moment you grab it out of the box and boot up the OS you see everything is _really_ polished. Sadly there was also some things which didn't work 100%, and the storage size of the device is limited. The pricing is pretty high too if you ask me (I am very poor, hehe). The whole LED bonanza is a nice additional feature, but personally if they could've skipped it and put the price a little down that way, I would've said yes to it. It's not like you buy a NDS flashcart to start your own (mini-)disco. ;-)


All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments and forum messages are owned by the Poster.