Buying a quality R4 DS has become notoriously difficult with so many imitations on the market along with units being made at varying qualities depending on which factory produced them. With no trusted, well known companies selling them, it’s a matter of luck for most whether or not they get a working unit or one that refuses to start up.
To make the task of getting a good R4 DS easier, we have compiled a table based on customer satisfaction of the leading UK sellers of R4 products. If you want to be sure you don’t buy a dud R4, check the customer satisfaction comparison table before buying.
You can see that there are a lot of blank spaces on in the table. This really demonstrates the lack of information available on the people selling R4s. Only three of those surveyed have any customer feedback on independent websites which collect and provide consumer satisfaction information.
You can click on the scores to read what customers are saying about the stores which can often give you a better idea than the stats alone. For example, I have seen a lot of people rating a company just on the quality of their website, before they have even received their order. It might be quicker though to read our overview of R4 Revolution store reviews.
I hope this has been useful for you. Leave a comment and let me know.
Why You Need an R4 DS
For under £25, the R4 DS Revolution allows your Nintendo DS or DSi to:
* Play free R4 Nintendo DS homebrew games
* Run free R4 homebrew applications
* Be used as a PDA
* mp3 Player
* Video Player
* Web Browser
* Word Processor
* And even a Mobile Phone!
If you’re wondering if you can use an R4 on DSi XL, I did a little test to check with my R4i (version 1.4 from Memory Card Zoo). See the results in the video.
Hundreds of votes from Nintendo DS homebrew fans from around the world. Now it’s time to reveal who everyone has been voting for and get a snapshot of the world’s favourite DS Homebrew. You can see all the votes cast by checking the comments on the DS Homebrew voting post, or just check the results below along with interviews with the developers of all the most popular Nintendo DS homebrew.
See it here and find out how you could win it months before the April 2010 Release date, or import one in time for Christmas (give someone a really big surprise).
Yet another R4 Revolution clone is set to be released very shortly, but this one is a bit more interesting. This R4 Revolution is designed by the people who brought you the M3DS. Like all the other R4s on the market, it is just another company which is using the seemingly freely available R4 Revolution name. The difference is that this one is actually connected with the production of the original. The M3DS Team are believed to have worked on the original R4 Revolution producing either the hardware or software.
There will in fact be 3 variations; R4i RTS (with a Real Time Save function), R4i SDHC and R4 SDHC, the latter being incompatible with Nintendo DSi.
It’s only been a year since the last DS console but Nintendo are releasing another version already. You’re probably aware that the DSi XL takes all the features of the previous model including the music playing abilities, web browsing, camera, sound recording and other stuff. The main difference is the new massive screens. The Nintendo DSi XL console has screens which measure 4.2″ which is an inch bigger than the previous screens and 1.2″ inches bigger than the standard DS. Being an inch bigger might not sound like it would make a huge difference but as it is measured diagonally across the screen it actually makes a fair difference when you see it. It is the equivalent to comparing a 32″ TV with a 42″ TV and you can really see the difference when comparing those. The increase in size of the Nintendo DSi XL would be impressive under any circumstance but it’s even more impressive when you remember it is happen to two screens.
See, the DSi XL has a much bigger screen. I think you have to see it to really appreciate it.
One thing that I’ve always been jealous about when I see a PSP is the size of its screen. It seems really impressive on a portable device to see such a big screen. The PSP’s screen measures 4.3″ (0.8″ larger than an iphone). A DSi XL screen is just 0.1″ smaller than a PSP’s screen… but there are two of them! I can’t wait to see the console. In fact I’m not going to wait. Well I am but only a few weeks because I’m going to import one as it’s cheaper to import consoles than I expected. The only thing that I was interested in about the DSi was the bigger screen. With the DSi XL it is going to be very impressive, so much that I’m keeping a DSi XL blog.
It will also give me a chance to test out the R4 DSi on it. I hope it will work because I’m keen to get drawing with Colors! on the big DSi XL screens. I’ll also be able to fit more things in my Pocket Physics sketches since there is more room to play around with. The resolution of the screens on a DSi XL isn’t any higher but you can see what you’re doing with smaller objects better so it will be easy to create a lot of them on the screen. I’m sorry I’ve been rambling through this post. The main thing I wanted to say is I’m looking forward to the DSi XL console, I’m importing one and I’ve got a new Nintendo DSi XL website.
Over the last two months I’ve collected hundreds of votes from Nintendo DS homebrew fans from around the world. It’s now time to reveal who everyone has been voting for and get a snapshot of the world’s favourite DS Homebrew. You can see all the votes cast by checking the comments on the DS Homebrew voting post, or just take a look at the results below along with some interviews with the developers and leave a comment to voice your opinion.
There are lots of alternatives to the R4 Revolution. They all really do pretty much the same thing – act as an adaptor for the Nintendo DS or DSi to read from and write to SD cards.
The question is which one should you buy. The most well known is the R4 Revolution. As I’ve mentioned plenty of times on this site, it has a massive identity crisis, with a huge amount of imitations, some with similar and some with exactly the same name. On top of that there are different variations of R4s from the companies that emerged out of the original R4 Revolution team. Because the original company has split up, there are no more official updates of the firmware. You can however get unofficial firmware updates.
The M3 has appears very similar and the software it runs is also very similar (so similar that R4 Revolution and can older editions of the M3 firmware). As with the R4, the latest edition of the firmware for the M3 was created in early 2008.
There are a host of other cards including the DSTT, AceKard, CycloDS. Each has their supporters but there seems to be no easy answer to the question of which is best. At the end of the day they pretty much do the same job and all work reasonably well if you get a good quality unit.
Some of the most popular DS cards badly photoshoped into one picture.
You’ve probably seen the top 10 best Nintendo DS homebrew. All the developers have won between $25 and $200 each. There’s two more people I need to thank for taking part in the R4 Nintendo DS contest; the voters and the people that spread the word about the contest. So, thank you for taking the time to vote, or post a link on your websites!
I can’t give everyone a prize unfortunately so I’m going to randomly pick one voter and one referrer.
I always expected it to happen. When I set up a blog featuring advise on where to safely buy a reliable R4 Revolution I knew I would get comments claiming to be from customers of stores raving about how good the service is at a particular website. Some of these seem credible but I suspect the majority are actually posted by the stores themselves to improve their image and get more sales directly from this R4 Revolution site.
