64scener.com
04-25-2008, 03:47 PM
A few pictures of the beast :D
http://www.64scener.com/temp/itouchds1.jpg
http://www.64scener.com/temp/itouchds2.jpg
He's back again with yet another Nintendo DS flash cart review, this time it's the iTouch DS which can be bought at http://www.consolesource.com with a
price tag of US$34.95 and with the extremely weak dollar, this cart is no more than 22 euros. So this flash cart is by far the cheapest flash cart
option for gamers across Europe. As if that wasn't good enough, the iTouchDS is manufactured by M3 who has been making DS flash carts for ages and the iThouchDS is supposed to be their budget cartridge.
But I decided to get one and take a test spin, so here it goes. The iTouch DS is a Slot 1 Flash cartridge which isn't too much of a surprise these
days to be honest, so I don't want to bother you much with that spec, other than a quick note for the ones with absolutely no DS knowhow, Slot means
that the cartridge has to be inserted into the Nintendo DS cartridge slot and not the "GBA slot" (Slot 2) in the Nintendo DS.
To be able to use the cartridge you need a microSD or microSDHC flash card. These are used in all sorts of camera, mobilephones etc. and are quite
cheap to come by, a one gigabyte microsd goes for $15 usually. Please note that no microSD is included in the package and to be honest it would be a
waste of money as microSD's included often are quite low on flash memory to keep the cost down and that often makes it pretty much useless.
Without a microSD the iTouchDS is also useless, so make sure to buy one if you don't have one already. The content of the iTouchDS box is pretty scarce, only the DS Flash cartridge (of course) and a USB flash card reader. What you don't get is a manual, not even a quick guide, or anything else to help
you get started. This is most likely another precaution to help keep the production cost down, but for non-techies this is quite sad.<P>
Not all hope is lost though, a website address ( http://www.itouchds.com ) is written on the back of the box and here you're able to obtain a manual
in PDF format, however the manual is close to being useless. Before you're able to start using the iTouchDS you also have to download a firmware pack which can be found at yet another website ( http://www.simplepluseasy.com ) though there's a link from the iTouchDS website. At the time this review was written firmware version 1.3 was available and the review is therefore based on this release. However as firmware releases happen quite requently in the early days of pretty much any DS flash cartridge, the firmware I've used could very well have been replaced with a more stable or bugfixed version.
When the firmware pack has been placed on the microSD cardridge you're ready to power it up. One thing I've noticed about the iTouchDS though is that there seems to be a little extra plastic left over from the cartridge mold, this would've been okay pretty much anywhere else on the cart other than
the microSD slot. Unfortunately this is exactly where it's sitting and it makes it a little tough to insert and eject a microSD. So be a little careful the first few times you insert and eject the microSD or you may end up breaking it.
I won't even bother mentioning the USB microSD card reader even though I actually just did, it's OEM, it's does the job it's supposed to be. But one
thing I can't seem to understand is why they even bother to include it, that would lower the cost even further wouldn't it? besides pretty much all
microSD's comes with an SD adapter, and who doesn't own an SD card reader these days? oh well I guess it's nice to have anyway.
FIRMWARE
A closer look at the firmware (Version 1.3) shows that it's multilingual, a total of 9 different languages being English, Italian, Dutch, French,
Spanish, Thai, German, Portuguese and Korean. Sadly my native language, Danish, wasn't available - hehe. I actually did a little testing with firmware 1.2 yesterday and it was nice to see that they had corrected a nasty bug in the firmware. When a language had been selected and you wanted to return to the menu, the screens would become complete crippled and you'd have to reboot the DS. Unfortunately you also have to reboot the DS in firmware 1.3 and you can't just just press the A button or something and the DS the reboots, no instead you have to power off and then on again. I honestly believe that this could be done a lot smarter.
Another oddity about this cart is that ROM images can't be placed in the root directory of the microSD, doing so will result in a screen saying that
can't create a save file and the game then won't start. So do yourself a favour and create a directory for your DS binaries.
Okay time has come to test a few roms, I made a dump of my New Super Mario Bros. After finally figuring out that roms had to be placed in any
directory but the root directory the game booted fine and my savegame was present even after a power off and on again (yeah I also checked that a
save file was present on the microSD). I tested a few other games all of which didn't cause any problems, but I don't feel like going too much into
detail about what games work or not. If a game is discovered to be non-working the manufacturers are pretty fast at releasing an update of
the firmware. But then again the iTouchDS claims to have 100% game compatibility.
The iTouchDS also boasts itself of supporting homebrew and even a auto DLDI patcher. However none of the 6 homegrown games I decided to give a try would work on the iTouchDS. Either the feature isn't available yet or I screwed up trying to run the homebrew.
On the menu screen there's a small icon next to the game title, here you are supposed to go to the settings menu but if you tab the small red icon
you'll be asked wether you'd like to run the game or not. However if you use the D-pad and place the marker on the red icon you'll be taken to the
settings menu. It's kinda stupid that the stylus can't be used but one can only hope that it changes in future versions of the firmware.
But with that said the settings menu offers a great variety of nice features such as a cheat option, slow motion/slow motion level, backup of save
games (nice!!), Normal/Download play, Reset switch. I like the reset switch but I kinda wish you would be able to switch it to on, or off, for every
game at once and not one at a time.
<BR>
The iTouchDS is definately a nice flash cart although there's clearly lots of room for improvement in the firmware to make it more user friendly.
One of the major downsides is that DS binaries have to be placed anywhere but the root directory, I have no idea why and it isn't mentioned anywhere
in the manual. But fact is that you can't beat the price and the cart and save works which is my main priority.
The iTouchDS can be bought here - http://www.consolesource.com
PROS:
+ Price
+ It actually works!
+ Very nice save support incl. backup function
+ Room for improvement
CONS:
- Not too user friendly
- Clearly lacks good firmware
http://www.64scener.com/temp/itouchds1.jpg
http://www.64scener.com/temp/itouchds2.jpg
He's back again with yet another Nintendo DS flash cart review, this time it's the iTouch DS which can be bought at http://www.consolesource.com with a
price tag of US$34.95 and with the extremely weak dollar, this cart is no more than 22 euros. So this flash cart is by far the cheapest flash cart
option for gamers across Europe. As if that wasn't good enough, the iTouchDS is manufactured by M3 who has been making DS flash carts for ages and the iThouchDS is supposed to be their budget cartridge.
But I decided to get one and take a test spin, so here it goes. The iTouch DS is a Slot 1 Flash cartridge which isn't too much of a surprise these
days to be honest, so I don't want to bother you much with that spec, other than a quick note for the ones with absolutely no DS knowhow, Slot means
that the cartridge has to be inserted into the Nintendo DS cartridge slot and not the "GBA slot" (Slot 2) in the Nintendo DS.
To be able to use the cartridge you need a microSD or microSDHC flash card. These are used in all sorts of camera, mobilephones etc. and are quite
cheap to come by, a one gigabyte microsd goes for $15 usually. Please note that no microSD is included in the package and to be honest it would be a
waste of money as microSD's included often are quite low on flash memory to keep the cost down and that often makes it pretty much useless.
Without a microSD the iTouchDS is also useless, so make sure to buy one if you don't have one already. The content of the iTouchDS box is pretty scarce, only the DS Flash cartridge (of course) and a USB flash card reader. What you don't get is a manual, not even a quick guide, or anything else to help
you get started. This is most likely another precaution to help keep the production cost down, but for non-techies this is quite sad.<P>
Not all hope is lost though, a website address ( http://www.itouchds.com ) is written on the back of the box and here you're able to obtain a manual
in PDF format, however the manual is close to being useless. Before you're able to start using the iTouchDS you also have to download a firmware pack which can be found at yet another website ( http://www.simplepluseasy.com ) though there's a link from the iTouchDS website. At the time this review was written firmware version 1.3 was available and the review is therefore based on this release. However as firmware releases happen quite requently in the early days of pretty much any DS flash cartridge, the firmware I've used could very well have been replaced with a more stable or bugfixed version.
When the firmware pack has been placed on the microSD cardridge you're ready to power it up. One thing I've noticed about the iTouchDS though is that there seems to be a little extra plastic left over from the cartridge mold, this would've been okay pretty much anywhere else on the cart other than
the microSD slot. Unfortunately this is exactly where it's sitting and it makes it a little tough to insert and eject a microSD. So be a little careful the first few times you insert and eject the microSD or you may end up breaking it.
I won't even bother mentioning the USB microSD card reader even though I actually just did, it's OEM, it's does the job it's supposed to be. But one
thing I can't seem to understand is why they even bother to include it, that would lower the cost even further wouldn't it? besides pretty much all
microSD's comes with an SD adapter, and who doesn't own an SD card reader these days? oh well I guess it's nice to have anyway.
FIRMWARE
A closer look at the firmware (Version 1.3) shows that it's multilingual, a total of 9 different languages being English, Italian, Dutch, French,
Spanish, Thai, German, Portuguese and Korean. Sadly my native language, Danish, wasn't available - hehe. I actually did a little testing with firmware 1.2 yesterday and it was nice to see that they had corrected a nasty bug in the firmware. When a language had been selected and you wanted to return to the menu, the screens would become complete crippled and you'd have to reboot the DS. Unfortunately you also have to reboot the DS in firmware 1.3 and you can't just just press the A button or something and the DS the reboots, no instead you have to power off and then on again. I honestly believe that this could be done a lot smarter.
Another oddity about this cart is that ROM images can't be placed in the root directory of the microSD, doing so will result in a screen saying that
can't create a save file and the game then won't start. So do yourself a favour and create a directory for your DS binaries.
Okay time has come to test a few roms, I made a dump of my New Super Mario Bros. After finally figuring out that roms had to be placed in any
directory but the root directory the game booted fine and my savegame was present even after a power off and on again (yeah I also checked that a
save file was present on the microSD). I tested a few other games all of which didn't cause any problems, but I don't feel like going too much into
detail about what games work or not. If a game is discovered to be non-working the manufacturers are pretty fast at releasing an update of
the firmware. But then again the iTouchDS claims to have 100% game compatibility.
The iTouchDS also boasts itself of supporting homebrew and even a auto DLDI patcher. However none of the 6 homegrown games I decided to give a try would work on the iTouchDS. Either the feature isn't available yet or I screwed up trying to run the homebrew.
On the menu screen there's a small icon next to the game title, here you are supposed to go to the settings menu but if you tab the small red icon
you'll be asked wether you'd like to run the game or not. However if you use the D-pad and place the marker on the red icon you'll be taken to the
settings menu. It's kinda stupid that the stylus can't be used but one can only hope that it changes in future versions of the firmware.
But with that said the settings menu offers a great variety of nice features such as a cheat option, slow motion/slow motion level, backup of save
games (nice!!), Normal/Download play, Reset switch. I like the reset switch but I kinda wish you would be able to switch it to on, or off, for every
game at once and not one at a time.
<BR>
The iTouchDS is definately a nice flash cart although there's clearly lots of room for improvement in the firmware to make it more user friendly.
One of the major downsides is that DS binaries have to be placed anywhere but the root directory, I have no idea why and it isn't mentioned anywhere
in the manual. But fact is that you can't beat the price and the cart and save works which is my main priority.
The iTouchDS can be bought here - http://www.consolesource.com
PROS:
+ Price
+ It actually works!
+ Very nice save support incl. backup function
+ Room for improvement
CONS:
- Not too user friendly
- Clearly lacks good firmware