DS-Xtreme review, special thanks go to Mod-Chip.com 28th of october 2006

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Introduction

Welcome to my review of the NDS flashcard solution, the DS-Xtreme. It has been developed outside of China which pretty much means no incorrect English! The DS-Xtreme fits in the DS-slot and is a flashcart rather then a media adapter with a size of 4Gbit (512Mbyte). This makes it the first big NDS slot flashcart (there have been others but limited to 1024/512Mbit. It runs backups without you having to patch them first. What is also very interesting is that it does not need your DS/DSL to be flashed, but it still has it's own menu. It also features an USB connection on the cart itself. But it works without installing any drivers for it!

The DS-X team also claims that the DS-Xtreme is able to run FAT-lib homebrew without a recompile (it also runs .nds homebrew). This is quite a claim, but if it works this could be a great advancement for DS-slot mods! As I have been testing it for a while now prepare for my judgement ;).

When the DS-X team announced all these things everyone found them very hard to believe. Though I have found that they are quite credible. So read on and find out :D!



On a side note my sample was sent out on Friday and it arrived at my house on Tuesday! That's four days not counting Sunday. It was sent via the standard shipping policy of mod-chip.com which is � 3.95.

The Review

Looking at the packaging

The Packaging of the DS-Xtreme is a very sturdy cardboard box. But the most outstanding feature is the fact that it is very small. It will easily survive rough shipping as it is well laminated. When you open it up (the flap tops open, see the picture) you will find the USB cable (a standard USB to mini-B USB cable, which I find a good choice because if you lose the original cable it can easily be replaced) and the DS-Xtreme unit inside a cardboard holder (with the shape cut out as an X, funny neh?).

As for the looks of the DS-Xtreme box aside from being small (weighing a nice 0.06 kilograms) are quite nice. And although there isn't much text on there there is no bad English on it (something I find very good and much more professional). The front shows you the DS-X logo, URLs and a few images with "features". The back shows the same URLs but now they also say what they are for (support and updates & sales and information). All in all I like the box as it does well what it was designed for, shipping. The design could have been a slight bit less "slim".

Build quality

The USB cable shipped with the DS-Xtreme is fairly standard and of normal quality. They didn't cut costs on it so thats good. It's a meter in length. Because I have the same type cable for many devices I don't really need it and I think you won't either, but if you do it will work fine.

When it comes to the build quality of the DS-Xtreme I was slightly less impressed though it will also perform good if you treat it right. The DS-Xtreme is made up out of three components. The PCB, the top bit of casing and the bottom bit of casing. Taking it apart isn't very hard (though I suggest you don't try this yourself unless you know what you are doing), the both parts are held together by the clamps around the edges of the cart (eight in total). Though underneath the sticker there are parts without plastic and directly on the chips of the PCB, so if you want to take the PCB out you should first remove the sticker. The two halves of the casing are made of rather thin plastic which feels very weak when you press down on it. It also doesn't line up perfectly. The casing will probably hold fine when you don't do anything strange to it but things like dropping it won't do it any good. As for the PCB, it's rather thin too, though that shouldn't be too much of a problem. The mini-B USB plug on it is quite nice and is put on quite sturdy, don't handle it too roughly but don't worry about it coming of.


Looks

Aside from what I stated above in the Build Quality about the two halves of the casing not fitting perfectly the DS-Xtreme looks quite nice. The fit inside the DS/DSL is just like a normal DS cart (and I have a fairly tight DS slot on my NDSL). Too bad I don't have a white DSL as that would have probably made the looks very cool.

The LEDs on the DS-Xtreme are also a nice feature if you are into that kind of thing. Personally I'm not that charmed by them during gameplay but when they are on because you have plugged your DS-Xtreme in your computer it's nice to see. When playing some audio/music however it is a fun feature. As you have no doubt already seen a few movies of the dancing LED function I won't put one up unless you people really want me to ;). The dancing LED function is an option that uses the DS-Xtreme's built in LEDs. It has three LEDs on each side, colored red, blue and green. It switches these LEDs on and off according to the music and gives you your own private disco show. Now although this is kind of useless it is a feature none the less. I've placed this under looks as I don't really count it as using the DS-Xtreme. Yes the dancing LED feature is used when playing music but the feature itself is purely looks. I will however talk about using the LEDs later.

Using DS-Xtreme
As you all know the DS-Xtreme does not need you to patch your games to run them. So when I got my sample I (after taking some pictures) hooked it up to my computer. Out of the box there isn't much on the unit other then two empty folders, a skin settings file and a skin folder. The folders are just a guideline as it doesn't matter where you put your files. DS-Xtreme will scan it's full memory when looking for games or music so you could even put it all in root.

After putting some files on the unit I safely removed it and put it in my NDSL. When I turned the DS on I was strangely not automatically taken to a menu (as I would have had when I would have been using a NoPass and for example my M3) but had to tap the screen to enter the DS' own menu. There I could select the DS game card (see image above)!

After selecting the DS-game card I was greeted by a "loading.." message (the image below but without the "saving EEPROM data" message). After about four seconds the main DS-Xtreme menu came. The top screen displays the DS-X logo while the bottom screen is the real menu. The menu has different options (from left to right): Apps, Music, Settings, About. I do have to say that the menu has somewhat of a lag.

Apps is of course to select a game to play that you have on your card. I've tried a bunch of games and was surprised to see that this device runs games very well! Compatibility is very high though there are some glitches now and again (such as the graphic glitch when saving in Phoenix Wright, or the incompatibility of the new pok�mon adventures; pok�mon diamond) but for example the Castlevania intro played at full speed! Homebrew also works surprisingly well. I've tested BeUP (0.3 final rein-16), DSorganize and some other FAT-lib homebrew which generally runs very well. ScummVM version 0.61 works perfectly but for some reason 0.91 (beta6) didn't work directly. Though after I saved with version 0.61 it seemd to have fixed itself. No matter what device I told ScummVM I had the DS-Xtreme didn't mind and was happily detected as whatever device ScummVM wanted. NDSmail however did not work properly so there seems to be some bugs now and again. I suggest the DS-X team releases a FAT-lib with sources so the homebrew developers can have a look around to see if they can fix the problem. The only thing I didn't like about playing games with the DS-Xtreme (though I would also like to see filenames instead of just header data) was the fact that it searches for new games on every reboot. This takes quite long. Possibly they could add an option that games are only searched for if the user wants to.

Something I do feel like mentioning too is the fact that download play (single and multicard) work perfectly to a flashed and to a non-flashed DS!

Music is the built in audio player. It plays MP3s and OGG files. Personally I find it rather useless. One can better use moonshell which has more features (things like L+R key locking). Though I'm going to talk about it anyway. When you drag'n drop some MP3 files on your DS-Xtreme unit, start it and select music you get a very graphical media player screen. Once there you can select Library to add music to your playlist. When adding to your playlist you can search on artist, album, genre, or all music. If you choose one of the options you will get a list of either artists (of music files which are on your DS-xtreme), albums, genres or simply all music. When you select a music file it will be played (or added to the cue). You can go to the next/previous song with the R/L buttons. If you have "dancing LEDs" (see Settings) enabled you will have a little disco show going on.

Settings. In the settings menu you can turn on "Instant boot", "Dancing LEDs" and the different color LEDs at different brightness levels. "Instant boot" which game you last started which will then automatically be booted if you start the DS-Xtreme. Thus skipping the DS-Xtreme menu (I feel that's a great function), though that can still be booted by pressing the A button during boot. "Dancing LEDs" is as stated earlier the option to have a display of all LEDs at different brightness levels be displayed during music play. The remaining functions speak for themselves; they let you set a brightness level for the different LEDS during normal menu or game-playing operation. When connected to your computer or during "Dancing LED" this has no effect however.

The last option in the menu is About. This normally shows the URLs for news, support and sales of the DS-Xtreme and the firmware version number. But as you can see I've changed it (very simple to do) to my own text as also displayed at the top of this review.


The DS-Xtreme can also act as a NoPass device if you want to use GBA media (adapter) carts. You can do this by holding select while booting the DS-Xtreme. This is useful as this means you shouldn't have to remove the cart ever again and won't need to buy a NoPass or PassMe 1/2 if you don't own one yet. Though I wonder how many times you will be starting (or if you will be buying) GBA media (adapter) carts if you own a DS-Xtreme, possibly for music or for "that one thing" (not meaning anything specific here) that isn't yet supported that's something I can think of. I've tested the Neo2-TF, SuperCard SD, EZflash IV lite deluxe, Ewin2-TF, GBAMP, M3lite, G6lite and DSmem all of which worked apart from the last three. It is however a known problem and it is being worked on according to the DS-Xteam.

Conclusion

The DS-Xtreme is a very new cart that already has great performance. Nearly perfect compatibility with both backups, at full speed non the less. Homebrew (.nds) also already works very good with it and so even does FATlib homebrew that has been written for different devices (which is the only possiblity at this time as there is no FATlib for the DS-Xtreme, if you are reading this DS-X team you should release it). It has a few fun and good extras such as being a NoPass device, not having to flash your DS (!) and the dancing LEDs, but also a few bugs to work out. But looking at the big websites of the DS-X team I think that fixes shouldn't be too long off.

Of course (for those who really wonder) no GBA game support. Hardware wise (casing) the DS-Xtreme could use a bit of a touch up as the casing really doesn't feel very sturdy. Memory size is something that does bother me. The DS-Xtreme is only 4Gbit big which is fine if you put "a few games" on there, and most homebrew will fit on there fine (though ScummVM games may take up some space) but if you want for example to put all your games on it you may get problems. Generally games are about 512Mbit so that would make for a total of about eight games. Using it as a big movie- musicplayer however is not such an attractive option. Also the price of the unit is quite high.

If you don't have any kit yet or you are looking for a new cart you can defenitely consider buying the DS-Xtreme as it a very nice product, but if you want to play a lot of music, etc., I suggest you go look for a media adapter. You will of course have to keep in mind the price tag.

Overall rating for the DS-Xtreme slot-1 flashcart
Discription	Rating (out of 10)
Design Boxart, manual and product appeal	8+
Hardware Hardware design, durability and features	7+
Compatibility Overall Homebrew and NDS game (if applies) compatibility score	9.5
Product future What this products future looks like	very good
Features (Built in) extra features of the NDS media (adapter) card	MP3 & OGG playback

The insides of the DS-Xtreme
On my sample the chips' names and types are removed but I know what they are; the actel (proASIC, A3P250, FGG133 0628, ZA620110), the one on the back (HY21UF084G2M, TPCB 620A).

FAQ
This here is the FAQ. If you have a question after reading my review you can ask it on my blog. I will then put it here and answer it as best I can.


• Can you run the OperaDS Nintendo DS browser via the DS-Xtreme?
  -Yes it works very well, but you will need the original RAM expansion pack that comes with OperaDS.
  
  
• Does DSlinux run on the DS-Xtreme?
  -I've tried the .nds build which crashes with two white screens.
  
  
• Does the DS-Xtreme really get detected correctly when using Linux on your PC?
  -I've tested it on OpenSuse 10.1 and it got detected like any other USB data device, so yea it gets detected by Linux and works.
  
  

I hope you all enjoyed my review and found it useful.

-Simon van de Berg

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