Battery life, SC vs. M3

davlor · April 25, 2006, 01:26:55 AM

I know everyone says that the M3 has better battery life than supercards, but I've never seen anyone actually compare the battery life side by side. Anyone here that has both cards, care to report the type of battery life you get on each card?

I'm most interested in the new miniSD varieties, but I'd love to hear about any format.

sneef · April 25, 2006, 03:14:46 AM

its hard to say because it depends if you are playing off the SD card (DS games) or using the internal ram... it also depends how often you do things like Real Time Save (which uses more power).. etc..

m3 claim better battery life, and though i haven't literally timed it, I can say I dont notice any major improvement over my supercard sd. (for ds games anyway)...

xabier · April 25, 2006, 04:11:02 AM

Which is better for battery life, playing from sram or playing from sd? i know that some ds can't be played from sram because they are bigger than it

thanks!

MajkiMajk · April 25, 2006, 06:06:03 AM

As far as I know, the GBA games are played from SRAM. You can actually see the whole ROM size preloading when starting it from the SC. In case of DS games, only few Kilobytes (Kilobites?) are prealoaded (like 1048K). Getting back to the life time topic. I actually timed my DS with a stopwatch. And, when playing with the volume turned half up (the volume slider in the middle of the scale) the run time (DS games only) was 5 Hours and 12 Minutes. The thing that suprised me the most was the fact, that the "low battery" running time (when power led becomes red instead of green) was 54 Minutes! :shock:

johnm · April 25, 2006, 06:47:23 AM

I heard somewhere too that if your playing from supercard and you have a ds card in the ds slot, battery time is reduced. Anyone know for sure?

xabier · April 25, 2006, 07:05:49 AM

Quote from: "johnm"I heard somewhere too that if your playing from supercard and you have a ds card in the ds slot, battery time is reduced. Anyone know for sure?

I don't know but i always use a ds cart because i dont want to get the slot dirty, nintendo advises to play with a cart on each slot

MajkiMajk · April 25, 2006, 07:21:49 AM

The slot getting dirty is one thing. The other is Sleep Mode. The DS won't switch into Sleep Mode when there is no DS game cart in SLOT-1 of the console. The power led keeps on flashing and the speakers keep on making clicking noise. And i KNOW that since i did it on my DS. By the way. I was doing the stopwatch timing on a regular silver DS with a SD SC and a Metroid Prime Demo game cart in SLOT-1.

johnm · April 25, 2006, 08:34:43 AM

Ya, Sleep mode doesn't work. I definitely read it somewhere, but it kinda makes sense if you think about it. If you have the DS slot full then the NDS has to supply power to that too. Can anyone confirm or disprove this. I've taken the ds card out recently and I didn't notice much of a differenct. But then again I don't know if my ds playing has been consistent.

754boy · April 25, 2006, 10:37:43 AM

Quote from: "johnm"Ya, Sleep mode doesn't work. I definitely read it somewhere, but it kinda makes sense if you think about it. If you have the DS slot full then the NDS has to supply power to that too. Can anyone confirm or disprove this. I've taken the ds card out recently and I didn't notice much of a differenct. But then again I don't know if my ds playing has been consistent.

I noticed no difference in taking out a DS card. But for some reason, if you have a passme in the slot, the battery drains faster.

MajkiMajk · April 26, 2006, 07:40:16 AM

Yes. Passkeys are known for the higher battery usage. FlashMe is the answer.