It shouldn’t be a news flash that there are a ton of flash memory cards on the market with varying degrees of quality and “originality”, some with very complex relationships. There are clones of clones of copies, and for some it is important to keep track of their history. For usability, the main concern is a proven track record of developer reliability. For example, the popular R4i SDHC is a clone of the DSTT but has a robust feature set and reliable updates. Note that even if a card is a known clone, it may be supported by professional teams of developers dedicated to upgrading. your letters. A clone doesn’t necessarily mean a bad and unreliable card, but there are a lot of deliberately confusing labels.

Still, packaging is often used to distinguish between cards from different manufacturers. The R4 SDHC (beige box) comes from the manufacture of the R4i SDHC (red box), and they differ from the equipment that makes the first R4 SDHC (black box). A bad counterfeit can mean instability or infrequent updates, but to date there has only been one card known to damage your DS console. The N5 card had a design flaw that caused a short circuit and a blown fuse after so many Micro SD card insertions.

This is not a complete review of each card, but rather an explanation of where it came from. The list is not exhaustive and unpopular and discontinued cards were not included to save space. To get an idea of ​​the breadth of the clones produced, see linfoxdomain.com for a list of all available firmware.

Initial developers started from Game Boy Advanced and continued with slot 2 flash cards (lower GBA slot on DS and DS Lite) for the original DS console. Those teams should be given credit and slot 2 cards discontinued to lay the groundwork. Some of them are still working today, including the Supercard team. Since then, there has been a lot of developer migration adding to the confusion of who was making which card.

The more advanced Slot-1 cards came into development as the Slot-2 cards fell out of use, and the R4 Revolution card quickly rose to the top in popularity. The R4 v2 is an upgrade primarily in removing the spring clip SDHC slot. The R4 team and the M3 team are closely related, if not the same team, and the M3DS Simply was a rebranded R4v2 with new firmware, as opposed to an unlicensed cloned card. The M3DS Real is a legitimate upgrade and not a clone of the M3DS Simply. The iTouch series comes from the M3 team, designed as an entry level to its family of cards. The M3i SDHC and M3i Upgrade are counterfeits that are NOT from the M3 team and should not be trusted.

There have been more clones and rebrands of the R4 line than any other card. Although they bear the same name as R4, several manufacturers are not affiliated with the original R4 team and develop their own families of cards and software. There are four different major manufacturers that produce an “R4” card. The original R4 team is gone, then there are the creators of the first R4 SDHC, the people who make the R4i SDHC (red box) started with a clone of the DSTT and also make the R4i Gold, the R4 Ultra team is less popular but still prevalent To add to the confusion, the M3 team developed their own R4i RTS (white box).

Cards from other teams were in development at that time or shortly after R4DS. They are original technologies in their own right and not clones of other cards; the DSTT, the EZFlash V, the Acekard, the Supercard DSONE and the CycloDS Evolution. The Supercard team claims that the CycloDS card is a clone of them, but this claim has not been substantiated. In general, the CycloDS is considered to be superior to the Supercard DSONE, and was so valued (albeit expensive) that it spawned the immensely popular Edge card as a clone.