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[sneef]

Hey guys,

Just got home with my supercard lite a little while ago.

First impressions:

Build Quality:  It is flush with the DS Lite, but supercard are back to their old tricks, with a cart that is very difficult to insert and remove.  Basically, I hate to say it, but supercard miniSD was the best quality build so far.

Having said that, I must also say that I'm impressed by the fact that they got it flush, with front-loading microSD, and not feeling too flimsy.

What is not so nice is the matte finish.  it is not glossy like the G6 Lite.  

Performance:  with a "vanilla" sandisk microsd, not too shabby.  Have to do further testing, but even running animal crossing from microSD has much less slowdown than I would have expected!

More after dinner.. to be continued

[meangreenie]

Is it true that the sc-lite has 64mb gba ram... can you write something like an uncut Tony Hawks to it. And if it does how does it play in the 2 modes ?

btw.. thanks for giving you're impressions

[sneef]

cant do too much right now, since my wife cooked us a lovely dinner, but I will check.  

I just checked.  I have no idea about the actual ram, but for now it makes no difference, because the patcher is the same version 2.542 (or whatever we are up to) as the normal SD and miniSD.  when i patched tony hawk as .dsi, it cropped it to 32 megs.. so that eliminates that.

i highly doubt there's more ram.

and since everyone's so obsessed with it, i tried castlevania intro.  stuttery.  but remember this is a vanilla sandisk microsD (and they are quite slow)

[Monkeydunk]

Sneef can you answer these questions please?

Is the micro SD spring loaded?

Does it feel solid enough to leave the Micro SD card in without worring that it might get loose in a pocket?

Cheers

Monkeydunk

[meangreenie]

Thanks for the info on ram.  

But can you test one of known slow-down gba roms  ?   something like yoshis island, alladin or DKcountry3

I know I'm too impaitent.

[sneef]

micro SD is not spring loaded.  for now it seems fairly secure, time will tell whether it gets looser, and less secure.

I can try a gba rom later.  I have almost no doubt the gba roms will perform same as always.

[khan]

Sneef: do you think ds games are running better on SC Lite than SC mini-SD ver even with you using a standard micro-SD card?

Thankx

[The_Legend]

is this "vanilla" sandisk of yours something like this one?



I'm planning on getting a SC Lite and one of this card. Currently I use a SC SD + Ridata PRO (66x) and I experience the "Castlevania intro slowdown", so I'd like to know if the SC Lite + Sandisk microSD will play it alright. I'm not concerned with the Castlevania intro itself (it's just a small video), but it's kind of a benchmark for flashcard speed.

[meangreenie]

99% games run faultlessly anyway.

There is only the Castlevania video and "Tony Hawks inbetwen music tracks" which are well known roms prone to slow-down, that's about all he can test.

maybe Animal -Crossing in-game menu screens too, but that can be solved by loading to gba ram anyway.

I think the big question is the GBA roms... surely they hav not used that crap gba ram again ? But then again it's very cheap still.

[meangreenie]

I think the problem with the castlevania video is access speed, because even the worst mem cards have a 10MB/s read speed (don't confuse with write speed) and there is no way that vid needs anything like a 10MB/s stream from the memory card. It must be done quite in-efficient by reading only a few bytes per game engine cycle, so access times would be crucial.

[sneef]

the_legend:  yes that's the kind of sandisk i'm talking about.

regarding tony hawk:  i just tried it.  with music, it runs choppy on this card, but better than it did on my EZ4 Lite.  about the same as on supercard miniSD with cheap-o sandisk miniSD.  REmember though, the speed of this standard microSD card is really slow.  

I would like to remind everyone that romman's initial statement was that the supercard micro has better performance, with almost no break (i think he means choppiness), when used with high speed micro SD flash.

The key here being "high speed" micro SD flash.  I will wait till i can find a high speed card and test.  There is none in Singapore, as far as I know.  I'll have to mail order which will be a pain, because of shipping costs.

[edit] regarding Animal Crossing:  the comment I made earlier about it not being all that bad is highly relative.  There is slowdown, but it's not as bad as the ez4 lite, and it's not as bad as a standard (not high speed) sandisk miniSD card in a supercard miniSD.

What did help on the microSD was formatting it to FAT with 64k clusters.  Using standard allocation unit size, the performance on animal crossing was worse.

[meangreenie]

Chuck a gba rom on ...Aladdin

[sneef]

arrrrrrrrrrgh!! :cry:

my scummvm games aren't working!!! one of the main reasons I got the supercard lite was for my homebrew.. :cry:

I already have g6Lite for regular games.  darn.  

anyone know why it may not be working?  I just copied the same exact files that I had already compiled for supercard miniSD and normal SD.

[meangreenie]

You haven't really got one have you Sneef. It's quite obvious now, and it was kind of obvious in the first place.

[sneef]

what the heck are you talking about?  want pictures?  what the hell??!!  why would i make something like that up?