A Backgrounder on R4DS Upgrade

Whenever anyone refers to a R4 card upgrade, you can be pretty sure that they want more from their Nintendo DS system. An R4 DS card is the most popular card available for use on such a system. It enables users to store and access media files and homebrew games on the console.Billed as the “revolution for DS”, the card bearing the same name was one of the first such cards on the market that could automatically boot up on a Nintendo DS console without requiring use of a Pass Me “unlocking” device.

With the availability of this card, upgrading R4 DS systems became a much easier and cheaper exercise for gaming enthusiasts than they could ever imagine. The initial design of the r4ds card was a spring loaded one, which proved to be a hindrance with time.Subsequently, a Version 2 design was created without a spring-loading mechanism to circumvent issues with spring mechanism failure that were reported earlier. Of course, there are now many more such devices, but most of them are variants or flat out unreliable clones.Once an enthusiast obtained a r4ds upgrade, he or she would then be able to load music files (in mp3 format), videos and text files to be accessed on the Nintendo DS console.With its fast loading speed and affordable price, it became one of the most popular r4ds cards available.

It was also more attractive than other such cards due to its firmware stability and rate of hardware failure, which was one of lowest among failure rates as far as these cards are concerned.Unfortunately, nothing is perfect. While upgrading R4 DS card added another dimension to the Nintendo DS console user experience, it came with some limitations. The most glaring of these restrictions, which have since been rectified, was a small memory size. That issue is now a thing of the past as nowadays, most DS cards accept micro SD cards containing a memory size of up to 32GB, a massive difference from those salad 2GB days.