acekard RPG Review

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Created on Wednesday, 04 January 2012 21:40

Last Updated on Wednesday, 11 September 2013 02:40

Written by Lynx

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So, there has been some hype around this new card.. As usual, I'm a little skeptical, as I'm a homebrewer, and 90% of the features listed have nothing to do with homebrew. Anyway, I contaced the manufacturer and they shipped me a sample to review.. So here it is.

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First thing I noticed is that this card isn't designed like any other slot-1 card. Normally, they try to look just like a commercial DS game. Acekard didn't bother with this, and there really isn't a reason to pretend to be a commercial game card anyway. The label is on what is normally considered the back. The "front" has their named stamped into the case and you can see the USB connector. So, from a homebrew point of view, the packaging is impressive and something you may be able to "wow" your friends by showing them.

But, impressive packaging or not, it's what's inside that really matters. It boasts an 8Gb internal flash card. What does that mean? Really, it's like haveing a 1GB USB flash drive inside the card. Drawback of having an internal flash chip is the size limit. So, to get around that, they added a MicroSD slot.

So, let's go over the features.

Dual Storage, slowdowns a thing of the past? Eh.. Don't know of any homebrew that has an issue with this..

Quick Exchange.. again, don't know of any benefit for homebrew..

Auto Save Type Detection? Again, not needed for homebrew..

100% Compatibility? Didn't know there was any issues with illegally downloaded warez romz.. so of course, this won't help us here either.

Support for most Homebrew Programs/games. AH HA! Finally.. something we care about.. Oh wait.. It kinda works? More on this later.

Rom Trimming.. Again, warez only.

Fully touch screen operation. Don't really get what that means. But we'll talk about the interface.


Original game cart size, blah blah.. Yup, that is nice. Packed it all into the little card.

Can be used as a PassMe to boot slot-2 cards. Yup, though it's really a "NoPass" device, but either way.. it's true.

using "write balance" technology. Heh.. this is a funny one.. Does it really use it? Who knows, you'll have to take their word for it.

Save files are directly written to memory. again, don't know of any homebrew that would benefit from this.

Micro SD files exchange.. Wow.. can you get any more blatent than that? Sure, you could easily share your homebrew using this method.. but somehow I doubt that is the intent.

Support Multi-language. Nice, I guess..

Easy Skin Change. Damn good thing! We'll touch on this more later.

Open Source. I'm still not sure if this is a good thing or bad. Half of me says, "YEAH!" we can do whatever we want with the card.. As people have suggested, the USB port might make a great debug interface. The other half of me says "BOOH!" as this leaves them the ability to drop support of the device. If they release the initial firmware, and "Joe" comes along and releases a "better" firmware, everyone switches to Joe's firmware. Now, this makes Joe the maintainer of the firmware for this device. So, if something isn't working, you have to talk to Joe, as it's his firmware. Or, go back to the original firmware that might not have the features you like.

Future features don't matter.. just like homebrew, if you can't download and play it.. it doesn't exist. Anyone can photoshop/youtube fake stuff.. Give it to me, and let me play it myself.. and then I'll believe it is real.

So, let's go in depth with this thing now. First thing I realized is that it doesn't have any onboard system. If you don't load something into the flash memory, you just get a "no filesystem found" error message. My sample didn't come with any software, so I had to go to their website and download it. This is normally a good thing to do anyway, as provided software will almost always be way out of date. So, I headed over to acekard.com and download the OS menu and loaded into the Flash memory. Booted the card into the "Zelda" theme and noticed how damn ugly it was. The only other option is "Black" and it's even worse. Good thing it's skinnable. Hopefully someone will release something that is easy on the eyes.

Now, loading software onto the device is as easy as they say. You just plug it into a USB cable, the computer finds it without issues, and you copy/drag/drop/however you like and just like any other Flash device, your done. Of course, if you want to use the MicroSD slot, you do the same thing with your MicroSD adapter.

Enough about the hardware.. let's check out the homebrew compatibility. Now, it says it auto DLDI patches, so I'm going to just download the .nds files and put them onto the card.

Here's the rundown
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Colors.nds V1.05 = Ran fine
A Touch of War = .9b = Ran fine
DSLinux (DLDI) = Kernel Panic
DSO 3.0 = Ran fine
Explosive Gas .7 = Ran fine
TickleGirl 1.0 = White screens
Tower Defense = Ran fine
WusteroiDS = Ran fine

Hmm.. Even after manually DLDI patching DSLinux, it still kernel paniced.

So, for the most part homebrew seems to run fine. I didn't expect TickleGirl to work, as it uses GBAFS which tries to read directly from slot-2. I just wanted to see if there was any "magic" involved to allow them to run.

Copying files from the internal Flash to the SD card is as simple as highlighting the game you want to copy, hitting start, selecting "Copy" and then going to the SD card, hitting start again, and selecting "Paste".

So, the bottom line, as far as homebrew is concerned, everything they state seems to be true. It almost has the same homebrew compatibility as the R4DS, which I believe is the most homebrew friendly slot-1 device on the market. Being that it has a built in USB port, as I mentioned earlier, this could have some potential benefits. Of course, like the DSerial series from Natrium42, it is a USB device port, not host port. It can have the potential of allowing your DS to communicate with your computer for items such as "hotsyncing" or producing debug information but currently there is nothing available to use the USB port while running in the DS. My USB cable won't fully insert into the card when the card is inserted into the DS, but it's in far enough for the computer to talk to it.

I also don't really see a benefit to having the 1GB onboard flash. Since MicroSD cards are cheap, there really isn't a reason to need it. So it's all up to the consumer if they onboard USB and 1GB of flash memory is worth the extra dollars compared to other slot-1 devices.

UPDATE: 10/03/2007

I'm running a DS Phat with just the acekard RPG (no MicroSD) in slot-1. I attached the USB cable and inserted the card into my DS. I then plugged the USB cable into the back of my laptop. It found the device and a few minutes later said it was available. I then browsed to it to make sure I could read it fine.

I then turned on my DS and it boot to the previous folder (svsip) with a single .nds file in it. At the same time, I tried browsing the folder and was able to. I created a .txt file and was able to save it. But, at some time, the DS locked up. I then turned the DS off and back on, and it was no longer able to load back to a menu.

I removed the acekard from the DS and connected it back to the laptop. I tried doing a scandisk on it, and it hung half way through. It appears the file system is corrupt, but it doesn't seem to want to repair it.

So, I reformatted it, and copied the system files back onto it. And it began to work as usual.

So, it looks like the hardware can handle it.. in theory. Every time I browsed the device while the DS was on, it corrupted the file system.. But, that doesn't mean the USB port can't be used for communication. I just don't think a computer and the DS can access the file system at the same time.. At least, not with the current firmware.