|
|
|
 |
|
M3 Adapter and PassKey 2
M3 Adapter SD version & PASSKEY2
Reviewed by: Jassen Payen
Buy Now: Asia/ROW North America Germany Italy Sweden Spain (Asia store ships worldwide)
Introduction
I’ve finally gotten a chance to test out the various functions of the M3 adapter to see whether it lives up to our expectations! Firstly, here is a slight recap of what the M3 actually is:
The M3 adapter was primarily designed to work with the Nintendo DS, allowing a plethora of functions, such as running homebrew games, applications, backups (GBA & NDS), emulators, music, picture browsing, ebook reading and watching movies through the convenience of either a Compact Flash or Secure Digital card, which is accepted by a slot in the M3 adapter. That is a lot of functionality on the tin!
The adapter fits into the GBA slot of the Nintendo DS. This is because of the encryption and authentication of the DS which only recognises original games.
To allow the DS code to run via the GBA slot, a passkey/passme type device is used in the DS slot, whereby an original game is inserted through its own pass-through slot to fool the console.
The PASSKEY2 is used in the NDS slot, along with an original game, which bypasses the encryption/cart authentication embedded in the NDS firmware, redirecting the DS functions to the GBA slot, where the lovely M3 does the rest of the work!
As the name on the package suggests (GBA Movie Player) the device also takes advantage of the GBA functions, this being the 3rd iteration in the line of the GBA movie player. Thus, those that have created the M3 should have good support for the GBA now, even though this is its first foray into NDS support next to the G6, another of its GBA/NDS flashcard lines, which uses its own inbuilt flash memory.
What differentiates the M3 from the various other flashcards on the market, such as the G6, is its ability to run files straight from the CF/SD media card, meaning larger, expandable memory that is separate from the unit, which drives the cost of manufacturing such a unit at consumer friendly prices.
The unit in question uses SD cards, which have become an increasingly popular format, widely accepted in Digital Cameras, mobile phones and other devices, offering cheap storage memory on the go.
Unlike other flashcard solutions also, the memory of a CF or SD card is specified in bytes rather than bits. This means that a £10 ($15) 512 megabyte card is equivalent to a 4 gigabit flashcard, which would not only cost about double, or triple as much, but the memory wouldn’t be able to be used in any other device, or expanded upon.
The only other device on the market that has similar functions to the M3 is the Supercard, which also comes in SD and CF versions, and will be compared to later in the review.
First Impressions
The M3’s exterior packaging has a vibrant design, sporting a flash looking 3D logo and a glossiness to it that is suggestive of good quality. It boasts a lot of information about its capabilities on the reverse, with some images and a lot of colour.
The unit itself feels very thin, sleek, and robust, with a brushed-steel look, and has a sticker of the logo on the centre. It has dimensions roughly similar to an original GameBoy cartridge, except slightly thinner, and 6mm shorter. You can smell the factory freshness off the device!
On the contrary to the eye-catching design of the M3, The PASSKEY2 comes in a smaller glossy black card box, going for the more minimalist approach. There’s a short summary of product features on the back, the PASSKEY2 logo, and an image of the passkey device on the front with angel wings just behind it.
The product features listed on the back of this box had a few typos and grammatical errors, such as ‘Base’ instead of ‘Based’ and ‘FLash’, questioning the quality of the product within. Inside the box with the same brush-steeled look is the passkey device, complete with a small programmable interface card for the GBA. When combined with the passkey, it allows its firmware on the PASSKEY2 device to be upgraded.
Back view of PASSKEY 2 and M3 adapter.
The M3 sticks out about 1.5 cm from the bottom. This is just over double the amount of space that the Supercard SD takes up, but isn’t a hindrance to how you play with your DS/GBA. The design of the passkey2 is great, and with the DS lid open isn’t noticeable. Unlike the Superpass, where the original DS game would slot into the top of the device, the passkey2’s own slot is situated behind the DS unit, and enters parallel with the underside. This makes for a sturdier design.
Side view of Passkey 2 and adapter.
All your base are belong to us - PASSKEY2
I decided to test out the PASSKEY2 device first, since this would be the first thing a new user would need to get their brand spanking DS to read the M3 in the right mode. It is based upon the update of the original passme/passkey/superpass devices except the past revisions were only limited to working with the firmware in early DS versions.
The old passkey tended to be picky, and in most cases refuse to work on any DS’s released that have newer firmware. The new PASSKEY2 claims to be compatible with all current and new DS’s and iQues (which is the Nintendo brand in China) and is also upgradeable, so it’ll be able to lay the smack down on any further revisions of the NDS. On the back of the passkey is a switch which lets you alternate between the original passkey1 and the new passkey2 for newer firmware, giving the best of both worlds.
I opened the box expecting some kind of documentation on how to use the device, and its interface portion, but it didn’t contain anything of the sort. There was a mini CD that came with the M3, so I searched it for the passkey instructions but found nothing. I decided I would just play it by ear and stick the device in the DS, I mean how hard would it be?
I put the passkey2 into the back of the DS, and used my Mario Kart DS game into the passkey2 slot. Like the superpass, the passkey2 gave a satisfying click into the DS slot to indicate that it is secure, and springs up a few millimetres to allow you to click it back out again when removing. I initially tried it with the switch on the back, set to passkey1 which booted fine. I wanted to simulate a newer firmware environment, so I hit the switch on the back to passkey2.
I put the M3 card into the bottom slot, and powered up…2 white screens. Bearing in mind my DS has already got FlashMe applied to the firmware, meaning the need for a passkey is negated led me to believe the PASSKEY2 wasn’t working. I proceeded to try many combinations into the DS with no avail, trying without a DS card, and then trying in the GBA slot with the interface, and with the Metroid demo.
I went to the official site looking for answers and downloaded a file relating to the PASSKEY2 update. This contained 2 .gba files, sram.dat file, and 2 manuals, one in Chinese and the other in English. Opening the English manual, I spent about 30 minutes trying to decipher and make sense of what was written inside, as the grammar, spelling and structure of the text was so bad.
 
The guide basically runs through how you use the PASSKEY2, and that it needs to be PRE-PROGRAMED with your desired NDS gamecard before it will work in this mode. So if you have a newer DS with newer firmware, you’d be in trouble without downloading this update file from the official site! Also contained within is a confusing guide on updating the firmware of the passkey2 with an updated list of compatible games code listing in its internal database, and a list of currently compatible games.
Passkey 2 - Passboot interface.
Following the instructions, I manage to get the PASSKEY2 programmed with the data so I can use my Mario Kart DS (E) with it. Resetting the NDS proved that this worked by finally booting to the M3 GUI. It works after a lot of persistence, but not as straight forward as it makes out to be.
Playing with the M3
Game Manager Interface.
Onto the meat and potatoes of the package! For the rest of the review, I settled for booting my DS via FlashMe (which amends the DS firmware code to allow PASSME functionality), thus relegating the PASSKEY2 device back in its box.
The M3 requires that games be patched through M3 Game Manager Software, which is at version 2.5 on the CD included. The software is relatively simple to use and does the task of patching the game ROMs and copying the files directly to the path of the SD card.
NDS game interface in Game Manager
When patching NDS games, there are a few options that can be experimented with, including:
• 'Trim/No Trim Rom' - which can trim the file size of the rom when patching,
• Fast-Boot (DMA 1x/4x) - this loads the games straight from the SD card and determines the speed of loading
• Normal/Directly Copy – this patches and copies the rom on the SD and gets loaded into the M3’s internal memory, which takes longer, and is limited to 32mb, but ensures more stability then running from SD card.
• You can also apply the ‘Same Setting’ to be applied to multiple selected ROM’s very handy!
For the purposes of this review, I updated the game manager software to the latest 2.7, and the M3’s firmware to e14 to ensure a fair current state of play and best compatibility possible for the unit. I tested 10 NDS games, including Tony Hawks, Sonic Rush, and Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, at default patch settings, and specified my target SD card. The task was very simple, and took around a total of 5 minutes to do. Also copied to the SD card automatically is a directory called NDSSAVE, which contain the .dat save files for each of the patched games copied.
Upon booting into the M3 menu, there is an interface with selectable icons that represent playing movies, music, picture viewing, ebook reading, and games. There is also a ‘Setup’ section, which I left defaulted.
On selecting the Joypad (game) icon, you can browse the contents of the SD card, selecting the game you want. Before proceeding, a screen confirming the right save file to coincide with the current game pops up. Pressing A continues the load process. After approximately 7-8 seconds, the screen goes off momentarily as if the DS has shut down, and then 2 seconds later, the game of your choice pops up!
I tried ‘Wario Touched!’ initially, completing the first few minigames, and waiting for the game to auto save. I then reset the DS turning off and on, noticing as I did that a warning screen comes up saying not to touch the DS as it copies the save from the previously played game onto the SD card. This means that for every game played, you have to make sure you reset the DS so that the temporarily held save is copied back over to the SD card, which takes approx 10 secs.
This is a function exclusive to the M3 and is somewhat of a double-edged sword. It uses the M3’s internal battery to store the save, which ensures in-game saving and playing is very slick. This is very noticeable with Supercard games, whereby when saving, although it can save on the fly to the SD Card, you most definitely notice slight slowdown in games.
Although this works fine, it presents many implications, and is slightly impractical. For instance, if a user decides to make any changes to the SD card that is being used before restarting, it could have some disastrous effects, e.g. copying over the save game on another SD card. Providing you remember to reboot each time, you shouldn’t have an issue, except the time it takes in doing this.
Nine out of the ten games I tried worked fine on the M3 with default settings, moving smoothly without any noticeable slowdown. Even though the save feature is a bit cumbersome, it does work reliably. For the game that didn’t work, which was Mario Kart DS (U), there have been known issues with this on the M3SD, and can most likely be resolved through patching on a previous Game Manager version, or with different patch settings (e.g. Normal Boot). Doing a quick search on the internet, I’ve found a few compatibility lists for the M3 SD version. While quite a few games need specific patch settings, only a handful are not working right now.
GBA interface menu in Game Manager.
With GBA games, the Game Manager works much like the patching of the NDS games, except the options include 3 types of patching (soft/hardware support1/hardware support2), IPS patching and a tick box to enable real-time saving. Since this review looks primarily at the NDS aspect, I looked at this very briefly, and tried about 10 games on here also.
Using default patch options (Real-time save/Soft patch), the ROMs were transferred to the SD along with a GAMESAVE directory that keeps track of the saves. I tried games that are problematic to the Supercard here mainly to draw a comparison. These include Super Mario Advance 2, a game known for terrible slowdown on the Supercard, and all worked flawlessly! I also tried directly copying GBA ROMs WITHOUT patching which worked a treat too.
The only issues experienced were when creating your own save template in the GAMESAVE dir of the SD card which matches the right rom name, and each .dat save you create, uses 1mb, which unexplainably is 4 times the size of any NDS save. Depending on how many games you decide to save, an extra mb a game can eat a lot of storage space! The saving works identically to the way NDS games save. The M3 also works flawlessly on an original GBA and GBMicro!
GB Micro with M3!
Bells and Whistles
The other curious features of the M3 that were explored include the ability to play music, movies, and view images. To my slight dismay, in utilise any of these features, and the “M3’s Crystal Engine”, you need to use software to convert the media first to a format the GBA/NDS can read. Each of the multimedia features has its own respective converter (movie converter, music converter, and image converter), which converts the media type to one that is readable on the GBA or NDS hardware. Today I’ll be testing the Movie and Music converters only.
First I tested the Movie Converter, which according to the txt file on the mini CD, requires a laborious installation of 4 different programs, including one that tries to uninstall all of your current video codec’s, in favour if its own codec’s. In this instance, it tried to install over my divx6. Whilst it doesn’t explain any of this in the installation instructions, I urge users trying this out to pay attention to what is being installed on their system at each step, since there is a risk that your video/audio codec’s can be overwritten.
Once installed, I fired up the video conversion software, whereby I was presented with a good clean interface with simple options. You can convert video for specific hardware, in this case, the NDS, GBA, or GBMicro. There are also 3 different quality variables, which are (High Quality, Standard, and High Compression). Using default options (NDS/High Quality), I tested converting an episode of ‘Lost’, which is approx 45mins long. The whole conversion process took 33mins outputting to a .gbm file, and unfortunately, unlike the Game Manager, doesn’t copy the video to the SD card. The quality of the video and sound was very good, it was clear and only contained slight artifacting, but to the screen size of the DS, the quality was very acceptable. There are slightly washed out colours during darker scenes, and the video only ran at 10fps, which is a little choppy for any live action videos, although for cartoons, and especially Anime, this should be fine!
On testing the Music converter, the interface is very similar to the movie converter, but instead of the system optimisation buttons, there is a drop down menu that allows you to select the quality, ‘8:Stereo’ being the highest, and all the other settings are default to mono which allow left or right channel selection. There is also volume slider bar, which I left at 1(anything higher and you’re in for some terrible distortion), and quality to highest.
I tested converting a Radiohead album ‘Kid A’ which has a great depth of frequencies. The quality of the output sounds similar to mp3’s at 64kbps and under. There is a lot of noticeable distortion, with scratchiness at high and low frequencies. Output is to .gbs files.
I would definitely recommend MoonShell over the Music Converter as MP3’s through the Supercard, and the NDS’s virtual surround has a sublime sound! As of yet, Moonshell isn’t available on the M3 SD version, but the M3 scene is very active, and I’m sure the M3 team will have a version for the SD before long. I will follow this up with a review as and when it is available!
Media Compatibility Woes…
For the whole testing procedure, I wanted to use my Viking/Toshiba 1GB SD card. This is what I have been using inside my Supercard SD for the last 4 months now, so I would have thought that everything would go smoothly tucked away inside the M3…Not quite…
When testing any NDS games, the SD card worked without a hitch, but the moment I switched to GBA mode, the M3 complains that there is no SD card present, and proceeding past that screen crashes the device! Searching the official M3-Forum, I found that there is a Wiki that has been compiled and documents the well-known compatibility issues of SD cards for the M3. Sadly, I noticed my card on the list, which shows the exact same symptoms I encountered, and it seems to be a common issue plaguing a lot of other high brand SD cards. Apparently firmware revisions are fixing the issue, but that means if you have bought one of the incompatible brands, you will need to buy/find another card that works in the mean time. This is a slightly disheartening issue that the M3 team need to resolve soon, as it will allow for many frustrations for inconsistencies in media in the long run! Fortunately, I managed to dig out a no-named SD card out of my dad’s dig cam that worked fine, the sole problem being that it was only 64mb in size!
Conclusion
Overall, the device is a joy to experiment with, and there is still much I’m learning with it. I’ve been following its development for a while now, and have been using my Supercard SD for the last 4 months. It’s understandable that the M3 SD, being less that 2 months old is still having many issues with regards to support, and right now, developers need to get to grips with the M3SD’s I/O since homebrew has been a little slow on the uptake, but it’s getting there!
The software for the M3 works well, but can be a little fiddly at times. For example, the amount of options you are given to patching an NDS game, if at first some games don’t work, you’ll more likely find yourself going back through the patching process amending a small change a few times until you get it right. For most that just want things to work, it will be the source of many frustrations, and worst still are certain Game Manager versions that work for certain games only. The M3 team needs to prioritise some consistency in their releases so that a progression in future compatibility doesn’t compromise the compatibility in older games, and work with the scene to give homebrew a good kick start!
The biggest issue of annoyance is without a doubt the media compatibility. For someone who didn’t follow the scene so much and just splashed out on the card, only to find their card incompatible would most likely think their M3 was broken first and foremost. Naturally, if the media works in everything else, why shouldn’t it work in the M3? Many suppliers could see returns on their hands if issues like this aren’t resolved as a priority.
The documentation to the PASSKEY2 is a big concern, especially for people that can only unlock their DS’s with a PASSKEY2 setting. Primarily, the PASSKEY2 should ship with some clear, simple instructions, even some diagrams to explain itself better, and should also contain the required software needed on the mini CD provided instead of having to hunt for it online.
Lastly, the saving process of NDS and GBA games is rather awkward, especially if you want to swap SD cards, at any point, or have an SD card with a similarly named save that is overwritten. When someone is done with a game, or has something urgent to attend to, in most instances, they want to turn the unit off, and be done with it until they next come back. It’s easy to forget the routine of backing up, but it does work if done correctly, it just takes time.
Other than that, I am very pleased with the design of the main M3 unit, and the PASSKEY2 once it is correctly configured does the job! Backup games play very good, and out of all that I tested; I only had a problem with one, which still bodes excellently for the M3. Also following the compatibility listing of ROM’s from the m3 forum, the M3SD offers about 95% compatibility at least, and this can only get better! Concerning compatibility against that of the supercard, it is only slightly behind, but still a two horse race with regular firmware, and game manager updates. Also the merits of GBA compatibility alone are enough to invest in the M3! It blows the supercard out of the water, and worked with 100% of the ROMs I tried, that I’ve wanted to get working on the Supercard for a long time, and runs them flawlessly. Again, the scene is very active, and there are a handful of games out of the 2000+ releases that exhibit some problems that can be remedied in some way or other if researched.
Niggles aside, this is a smashing device, which more than matches up to the capabilities of its closest equivalent. If the issues above can be ironed out in the near future, especially the SD card media compatibility, we’re looking at a winner on our hands.
Positives
+ Nice robust design with quality feel
+ Works with at least 95% of Commercial DS games
+ Works with 99% of GBA games flawlessly
+ Works with GBA games without patching
+ Easy to use GUI
+ Converter software for movies and audio work straightforward/good quality
+ Saves to M3 Internal memory first = faster in-game saving.
+ Many patching options for both NDS/GBA to play with
+ Access SD card without removing M3 Adapter!
Negatives
- Expensive/only available as bundle
- PASSKEY2 fiddly and no software with device
- Documentation unclear
- Awkward Save management
- Patching process can sometimes be hit and miss for NDS games
- GBA Saves = 1mb, takes up media memory!
- SD CARD MEDIA COMPATIBILITY INCONSISTENT!!!
Buy Now: Asia/ROW North America Germany Italy Sweden Spain (Asia store ships worldwide)
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
