- Introduction -
The Supercard DS ONE was released quite a while ago. At
launch, it seemed to be a great choice. Coming from the Supercard Team, it
was expected to be the best of the best, continuing the Supercard line of
flash carts that seemed to have dominated the market. Soon after, many
realized that there were superior flash carts on the market, namely the R4DS.
It seemed obvious at the time that the R4 was a better choice, even in our
previous reviews, the R4 came out superior.
Recently, the Supercard DS ONE experienced sweeping
changes, with not only firmware revisions, but hardware revisions as well.
These changes created a whole new name for the Supercard DS ONE, no longer is
it a cheap cartridge that may get stuck inside your DS, but one that has
amazing features that no other flash cart offers. Even so, it seems that
other carts still dominate the market.
The Supercard DS ONE now sports a completely redesigned
white shell and a new sticker, as well as an impressive new packaging. The
features of this cart have also been enhanced with abilities such as cheating
and accessing a guide.
- Design -
When I received my Supercard DS ONE v2, I was very
pleasantly surprised. Even the previous Supercard DS ONE had quite decent
packaging, however, the Supercard DS ONE v2 had, by far, the nicest design I
have ever seen for a flash cart. A professional box art was put on high
quality paperboard, in between is dense foam. Unfortunately, the descriptions
on the back of the box still bear the terrible grammatical mistakes that
appear in all Supercard product packaging.
It is as if they don't have spell-check in China.
The box opens up similar to a book. On one side of the box
there is the manual and the setup disk, which is once again full of
grammatical mistakes, as well as completely outdated. On the other side,
protected by foam, are the freebie MicroSD reader and the Supercard DS ONE
v2. The freebie MicroSD reader looks amazingly professional with a white
casing as clear letters printed on it. Also impressive is the performance on
the reader.
Freebies are always nice, especially when they work well.
It is nice to see a manual, even if it is outdated.
However, the most important object inside all this
packaging is the Supercard DS ONE v2 itself. The newest batches of the
Supercard DS ONE v2 all come in white casing with stickers featuring the
Supercard logo. It looks quite nice, and the sticker does look like it is
quite high in quality. As with the previous Supercard DS ONE, this cart has a
chip protruding out of the casing, and is covered up by the sticker. However,
unlike the previous Supercard DS ONE, I had absolutely no issues inserting and
removing the flash cart from the Nintendo DS.
It is an impressive change from the original Supercard DS ONE!
Also a nice feature of the Sueprcard DS ONE v2 is the
spring loaded MicroSD reader at the top of the Supercard DS ONE. Although not
implemented like the R4, where you could remove the MicroSD without removing
the cart, the Supercard DS ONE v2 has a pretty secure MicroSD reader that
seems quite stable and strong.
- Software -
The Supercard DS ONE has bundled software along with it.
Even though it has drag and drop capabilities, some of its features rely on
bundled software. Two of the acclaimed features of the Supercard DS ONE are
cheating and real time guide. Both of which requires prepared files on the
computer.
Cheating with the Supercard DS ONE requires creating a .scc
(Supercard Cheat) file and then running it on the Supercard menu. The scc
file is an encrypted file which contains the same information as any other
cheat file, however, the Supercard Team had to make the Supercard only
recognize these encrypted files. With a buggy converter, it is quite hard to
convert cheats, and I often found myself using the
Supercard DS ONE cheat
database (by JMR and meangreenie) instead. Even though the Supercard DS
ONE has, by far, the most impressive cheat system I have seen yet, the
computer side software seems to be half completed.
The cheat code works great on the DS.
Real time guide is a feature of the Supercard DS ONE that
allows users to pull up a txt (text) file at any point of a game. This
feature proves extremely useful when playing long RPG games. However, similar
to the cheating system, the Supercard DS ONE will not accept a raw txt file,
but instead, an encrypted scb file (Supercard Book). Using the same half
completed converter, you must change your txt file into an scb file, at
points, some files will not even convert. However, it wasn’t all that much
work, and when it does start working, it is quite an amazing and useful
feature.
I don't really like the font and resizing, but it is still a nice feature.
The last piece of software that the Supercard DS ONE v2
uses is the Supercard patcher. Supposedly it is used to “enhance
compatibility”, however, I have never had a compatibility issue using drag and
drop, and thus I had no reason to use this software.
- Use -
The Supercard DS ONE v2 uses a popular homebrew application
called MoonShell as the base of its menu. However, after booting it up, you
will notice that there have been some major changes to make the menu faster
and more beautiful.
I really like the menu, especially how customizable it is.
After looking at the gorgeous menu for a few seconds, you
will notice that the menu is at the top screen. Changing the global.ini file
or clicking L+A buttons allows you to swap the screens for touch
capabilities. The options at the top allows you to change things such as how
the games are displayed in the menu, how they are sorted, as well as give
options for booting a slot 2 cart, use the web browser, etc. The most
important function at the top is the “Enable Patch” menu under the “Other”
section. This enable patch sets up the way the Supercard DS ONE v2 runs a rom,
from allowing it to reset into the main menu to cheating in mid game. When
roms don’t work properly, check this menu first for problems.
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