Mass Market DS Homebrew Cart Released

Croakyvoice writes "Datel has finally released the Games n Music Homebrew cart for the Nintendo DS, this mass market entry level cart features a 128mb Micro SD card and comes with a 25 game CD of the best of DS homebrew games." Games 'n' Music contains everything you need straight out of the box. It even comes bundled with a 25-game CD, offering some of the best games the DS home brew scene has to offer, as well as a video conversion program."

Royalties?

[Perseid]

I bet Datel didn't make those 25 games themselves. I bet the video converter is just BatchDPG. Why would I buy this when I can get a Supercard?

One question:

[Ant P.]

Did the homebrew writers get a fair deal when Datel took their work and sold it at a profit?

Re:Royalties?

[PopeRatzo]

With increased delivery of games via the internet, I think we're going to see increased efforts to view game devices the same way the telecom industry views cellular phones. That is, they own the hardware and we just lease it from them. Just as we're not now able to buy any device we want and use our cellular service in any way we want, the game industry would love to prevent us from using products like Supercards or the one in this article.

It's one of the reasons I won't use services like Steam. The iTunes/URGE model, which so many of us have come to loathe is just around the corner for the game industry.

As always, though, I've got my money on the hacker-innovators of the world to do to these efforts what they are successfully doing to the rest of the IP gangsters.

I heard an interesting interview on NPR today with a vice-president from some telecom anti-regulatory outfit. Everytime the interviewer (Brooke Gladstone from "On the Media") asked him why we can't get call-timers or non-crippled Bluetooth on our cellular phones, he just kept chanting "Free Market, Free Market, Free Market". He referred to the telecom industry as one of the most competitive of all. I wish people would learn that there is a very dark side to this worship of the "Free Market" and that regulation is often a very very good thing.

I salute the subversive efforts of the people who sell and use the Supercard and the gizmo in TFA. They may not realize just how revolutionary they are or how necessary such efforts will be for consumers. A corner has turned a while ago, and industry can no longer be absolutely viewed as friendly.

Re:Wal-Mart has similar hardware on the shelf

[DanTheManMS]

The MMD officially has no support for commercial roms. However, soon after its release, a patcher program was released by an "anonymous" source that lets a few games run off the device. Compatibility sucks though, so no one would knowingly buy the product for that purpose. Interestingly, this patcher program was later modified so that the GBA Movie Player, which is electrically similar, could also run a small selection of DS games.

However, this device is different. While the MMD is a slot-2 device that comes with a slot-1 launcher, this new product resides solely in slot-1 and has a built-in launcher. However, until a DLDI [drunkencoders.com] file [pocketheaven.com] is created for this new product, very little homebrew will work on it, meaning that its main capability will probably be just playing music, which most likely will use Moonshell anyway.

It is possible that the Music and Games card here is actually a rebranded R4 or M3 Simply, in which case the existing DLDI files would suffice. Anyone know if this is the case?

Bought one

[jshriverWVU]

A friend and I bought one when they first came out in January. It's a nice device for watching video or listening to music. But the more I look at it, it's not the greatest for homebrew. There isn't a dldi driver available so you can't access the filesystem. This become a big program for homebrew software. DSLinux does run on it nicely as does a lot of homebrew software (assuming it doesnt need filesystem access). I just hope Datel would release a dldi driver or open up the specs a bit so someone can write one. Plus it's nice to be able to walk into a known store and buy something you can sorta do DS development on, instead of ordering online from Hong Kong from a grey area market.

Old news?!?

[3on3]

I am confused.I saw this at best buy a month ago and I heard they recalled it. Is this the rerelease?