Well, I've spent some time with my DS flashcard, so now for the thread where I tell you about a lot of cool stuff. I talk about this stuff in the podcast, so have a listen.
Real Hot Stuff is where I ordered my DS flashcart from, and I bought the R4DS. Unfortunately, it looks sold out now. The M3 Simply is the exact same card, just branded by another company and uses its own firmware so go for that if the R4 doesn't come back in stock. It'll run you $40 for just the cart by itself, but you will need to buy a Micro SD card to use with it. Micro SD cards are really cheap on newegg if you don't mind ordering separately.
I paid the $3 extra to get DHL shipping with full tracking and even though it was supposed to be at least 2 days, I got it next day. The site has a great rating on resellerrating.com. So you can look at other sites that might offer the card cheaper, some of them can be pretty shady. And many of them ship out of Hong Kong so the shipping charges will rape you.
There are two kinda of flashcards, Slot-1 and Slot-2. Slot-1 are "standalone", the plug into the DS slot and run from there. The Slot-2 fit into the GBA card slot and require what is called a "PassMe" card in the DS slot. The PassMe usually comes with the slot-2 cards.
Why would you want one over the other? Well, the Slot-1s are nice because its just one card, you can put your GBA games in slot 2. The Slot-1s are pretty popular and going forward compatability should be good. On the other hand, the Slot-2 cards allow you to make use of GBA homebrew as well as DS. Don't worry if you buy a slot-1, there is a product called the EZ3-in-1 that plugs into the GBA slot and allows you to have extra RAM (like the Opera browser uses), GBA compatability, and rumble. That'll run you about $20.
One term you'll see is DLDI. This is a driver kind of thing that allows homebrew to work on various cards. Sometimes you'll have to manually patch a homebrew rom to work for your specific card. Its not complicated and some cards can auto-patch things for you. Just something to be aware of.
And now, the cool stuff.
WordUpWord puzzle game like Bookworm. The "ad" on the page is in black and white but the game is actually nice and colorful. On the bottom screen are blocks with letters on them, and you drad the stylus over the letters to spell words which then is scored and those letters are removed. All the while new letters drop down from above. If a column gets full to the top of both screens it begins to shake and you have 10 seconds to clear some letters or its game over. Pretty addictive.
Word WrapSimmilar to Boggle. You are given a random assortment of letters and must use those letters to spell words. Each "level" is based on how many words you can find, and it gets more difficult the higher you go because the words get longer (and there are fewer words you can form overall).
DSDoomIts Doom, on your DS. Pretty damn cool, except I didnt hear any music. Sound worked fine. One screen shows the action, the other screen shows the map and HUD.
QuakeDSQuake, on DS. Again, pretty nifty. Controls similar to Metroid Prime Hunters.
ScummVM DSOne of my faves, play classic adventure games on DS. Works wonderfully.
PuzzleManiakA collection of puzzle games. Not the best looking game around, but if you like puzzles it's probably worth having.
Everlasting LoveYou play as a monkey that loves the beat of the music playing (Which is Everlasting Love from the We <heart> Katamari). He bops his head to the beat of the song, and if you tap him on the beat he jumps really high. The goal is to get through the levels with the fewest number of jumps and avoiding hazzards, so you'll sometimes have to tap off-beat to keep him from hitting spikes on the celing.
Cave Story DSJust a demo right now that lets you run around and see stuff. Soon we'll get to, like, shoot things.
ColorsDrawing app. Really cool. Highly reccomended.
Fatbits Pocket Painter (aka, Photoshop DS)
A really awesome looking art app that isnt released yet. Might become an official product, or might be released as homebrew. I want it either way.
GeoWarsGeometry Wars clone. I haven't gotten it working properly.
DSOrganizeAn organizer app thingy. I havent used it myself, but it has a web browser, media player (supports a ton of formats), calendar, notes, todo lists, etc. The kind of thing that would have been awesome if it was built into the DS.
DiceWars DSDice Wars. On DS.
NethackNethack, on DS. Havent messed with it much.
DScentDecent. Another one I haven't used yet.
DsHereticHeretic...havent used, blah blah. Theres also one for Hexen.
ArcomageArcomage is a port of some MMO card game. You have a castle and a wall, and so does the enemy. You play cards to damage the wall so you can then attack the castle...or play cards that rebuilds your own. Kinda cool.
Comic Book DSRead comic books (or any image, really) on your DS.
Image ViewerAnother image viewer application.
And theres even more stuff. AmplituDS is kind of like the PS2 game Amplitude, theres several apps to teach kanji and stuff like that, and theres even ports of text adventures like Zork. And just now I found a port of Lemmings!
