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[Squash-n-Stretch]

what is an sdhc card?

[dantheman]

SDHC stands for SD High Capacity and means you can use cards larger than 2 GB. 

SNEmulDS is an SNES emulator for the DS.  It can use additional slot-2 RAM if present, but can work without it as well.  If used, the extra RAM is used solely for storing large roms so that the paging system doesn't need to be used (swapping in 1-2 MB chunks of SNES ROM into the DS's 4 MB of RAM as needed).  For small games it doesn't make any difference. 

[Squash-n-Stretch]

What do trimmed and un-trimmed DS games mean?

[Devil_Spawn]

to put a game on a real card they must fill it to a 'round number' in size - 8mB,16mB,32mB,64mB,128mB,256mB... if you trim the rom it  removes the excess space that was filled up, and so can reduce the size of the rom by 2-20mb ish

[Xephyr]

I've got a Cyclo DS Evolution.. Grab one, and get it from RHS if you can. They are exceptional, have good pricing, and unbeleivably fast shipping speeds.

The Cyclops team does a great job of updating firmware, and I haven't found anybody on their forums complaining about getting bricked by an Evo. Yah, the Evo has been reported as having the microsd sticking out of the cart, but it's so unbeleivably small that it's hardly worth mentioning, something on the order of 1/32nd of a millimeter.

The nice thing is, they provide an auto-trimmer that runs in the background on your pc and automatically trims all roms (which isn't even necessary, just nice to save room), and it has automatic DLDI patching built into the unit, so you don't have to worry about patching 95% of the homebrew out there.. just drag it onto the card, drop the card in the cart and you are good to go.

Another thing to note for the quality of the cart: The UI is all on the touch screen, and is fully skinnable, with hundreds of skins readily available and guides on how to make your own, if you are feeling artistic. 

The last thing I found in my research before I chose my cyclo: the microsd slot isn't spring loaded, which is a good thing. I've heard about people with spring loaded carts losing their microsd becuase the spring latch broke and it launched the card into "lower earth orbit" as they put it. hehe.

Sorry about the brisk format of this post, I'm typing it at work >.>

In short: I love my Cyclo, and I love RHS even more for their fast shipping (only to the US though  )

[h8uthemost]

It doesn't really matter what slot 1 you get, they pretty much all do the same thing. Just one might have more features than the other.

If you want a cart just for basic gaming and homebrew, then you should probably just take the cheap route and get either an R4 or DSTT.

[Squash-n-Stretch]

I've got a Cyclo DS Evolution.. Grab one, and get it from RHS if you can. They are exceptional, have good pricing, and unbeleivably fast shipping speeds.

The Cyclops team does a great job of updating firmware, and I haven't found anybody on their forums complaining about getting bricked by an Evo. Yah, the Evo has been reported as having the microsd sticking out of the cart, but it's so unbeleivably small that it's hardly worth mentioning, something on the order of 1/32nd of a millimeter.

The nice thing is, they provide an auto-trimmer that runs in the background on your pc and automatically trims all roms (which isn't even necessary, just nice to save room), and it has automatic DLDI patching built into the unit, so you don't have to worry about patching 95% of the homebrew out there.. just drag it onto the card, drop the card in the cart and you are good to go.

Another thing to note for the quality of the cart: The UI is all on the touch screen, and is fully skinnable, with hundreds of skins readily available and guides on how to make your own, if you are feeling artistic. 

The last thing I found in my research before I chose my cyclo: the microsd slot isn't spring loaded, which is a good thing. I've heard about people with spring loaded carts losing their microsd becuase the spring latch broke and it launched the card into "lower earth orbit" as they put it. hehe.

Sorry about the brisk format of this post, I'm typing it at work >.>

In short: I love my Cyclo, and I love RHS even more for their fast shipping (only to the US though  )

Thanks, that's a lot of info. I think I will be going with the Cyclos. I am in Europe though, so will probably be buying from console plus... is that pc software you mention part of a download? Because the Cyclos doesn't seem to come with a disc. Are there any risks from 'trimming' games? Like may they not run, or save files going missing? Is there anything I should know about saving games, where to keep to files, should I back them up, etc?

[sonicwind]

you need to find the right trimmer or download play won't work, but don't worry I don't think there are any that kill games.  And the best way to get the software which there isn't any is off their site(use it for firmware updates there is no software).  If you want to back up your games, it's all your decision.

[Xephyr]

All the software is available for download from their website, cyclopsds.com ... there's no disc that comes with it but the firmware updates and the auto-trimmer are very easy to grab from their support section.

The trimming process doesn't affect saves at all, it only messes with ROMs. I have yet to find a game that the autotrim program has messed up, generally speaking all it does is remove unnecessary information from people who have overdumped games.  I've never even seen a complaint on the cyclo forums about bad trimming in any instance.

As for saving games, nothing complicated is necessary. Just save like normal in the game, a game save file is stored on the micro and is there to use next time. I personally back up my saves whenever I reconnect my micro for a new game I've bought or at least once a week, since by the nature of data there is always that small possibility of corruption, but it's not common on the Cyclo except for a few complaints about it happening during firmware updates, but TC is very quick to respond to any such cases and prevent it from happening again.

A couple of other neat features I forgot to mention:  There is an in-game menu for adjusting your DS screen's brightness level, as well as a slowmo mode for those really tricky spots you just can't get past with your skills alone.  They are even ironing out the finer points on a real-time save feature that's in the beta firmware. Fun stuff. 

Edit: h8u does have a point. While the TT and R4 are decent carts and are nice enough to work with, the quick response from TC for patching Evo bugs and the extra features available on it are more than worth the slight increase in price.  I've become a fiercely biased user. 

[Squash-n-Stretch]

Does the cyclos come with emulators pre-installed? If not, how do I install them? For older console emulation, do I have the choice of which screen the game outputs to?

[dantheman]

None of the slot-1 devices come with emulators pre-installed.  You need to install them on your own.  Each one is done in a different way, and you can usually read the ReadMe file to figure out how.  Some emulators support screen swapping (SNEmulDS for instance) while others don't (like NES DS).

[cdaters]

First and foremost, SC rules. But since you ask, I will share my experience....

I've got an SuperCard DS One SDHC slot 1. It runs everything I have thrown at it no problem. I have Atari, NES, Colleco, Genesis, and SNES emulators on it that all work just fine.

I just recently added an EZ-Flash V 3-in-1 slot 2 cart into the mix, and the two work just fine together (with GBA ExpLoader). I could not be happier. I have heard a lot of positive reviews of Cyclo, and I am still tempted to buy one, but I am very happy with my SuperCard.

I also have a TTDS (or, DSTT as it reads on the box it arrived in) and this slot 1 cart has also taken almost everything I have thrown at it with a couple of exceptions. It has white-screened (crashed) on me with a couple of homebrew apps/games. There is no publicly available DLDI file or source for this cart, so I was not able to get DSVideo to run, but as you mention you utilize your PSP for this, this should not be a problem. The only other issues with homebrew was with 1 or 2 homebrew games I tried. Otherwise it plays the emulated stuff, plus normal NDS roms no problem.

I am a stickler for organization. It kills me to just copy everything to the root directory of the microSD cards. I wish that developers would code these shell firmwares and apps to use relative paths as opposed to hard coded paths. Some of the emulation apps are this way. You must have some of these files on the root of your card, but for the most part, I am able to organize everything.

This brings to mind another quirk with the TTDS slot 1 cart. This cart will not sort your roms/apps etc. in an order that makes sense (like ascending or descending order by date, or filename). What I mean by this is that as you add roms over time, you will notice that the cart does not re-sort your rom list. Newly added roms will always be at the bottom of the list. A work around for this is to move your roms to a different location on the card, start up the DS to the main menu, then shut it down and move your roms back to their original location and start up your DS to the main menu once again. This time, they will all be in alphabetical order. There is an alternative firmware OS for the TTDS. It is called YSMenu, and it works very well with out the quirky file order work around. I have no experience with the R4, but am told that it is very similar. I have tried YSMenu, and it has taken everything I have thrown at it, no problem.

I hope this is helpful

[Squash-n-Stretch]

There is a Cyclo ds in the post

Which are the best emulators that I can install onto it for the NES, SNES, Mega Drive, Master System, DS, etc?

[dantheman]

NES DS, SNEmulDS, jEnesisDS, AprenticeMaster or whatever the name is for that new SMS emulator that comes with the latest version of jEnesisDS (or DSMasterPlus for the older SMS emulator).  DS games don't need to be emulated, they're run directly from your card.

[Squash-n-Stretch]

AprenticeMaster or whatever the name is for that new SMS emulator that comes with the latest version of jEnesisDS (or DSMasterPlus for the older SMS emulator)

What's an SMS emulator?