Memory card "DS-Xtreme" (DSX) for the Nintendo DS (NDS)

As of June 2007, 47 million Nintendo DS units has been sold. That's quite an impressive number, and has been the fastest selling platform in Europe. As soon as I got my hands on one of these units, I started looking for ways to use "homebrews" (= software written for the NDS usually published for free).

There are a lot of great homebrews for the NDS, but a "memory card" (solid state ROM) is required to use homebrews. You must have a way of putting the homebrew onto the NDS. A lot of different memory cards exists. After poking around, I found that DS Xtreme card (DSX) looked to be a good choice.

Several reasons why I preferred DSX:

• Comes in sizes up to 2GB.
• The pysical size is no larger than ordinary game cards.
• No need to patch/modify the NDS, the DSX works as an ordinary "game card".
• USB interface directly onto the card which works flawlessly.
• Support (which I found out where excellent) and forums.
• A large and active community.

Okay, so how do I get hold of one of these cards? I found a Norwegian shop modnet.no which had the 2 GB in in stock.

The device arrived the next day. Great! Inside it was only a USB-cable and the DSX itself. I had read that the 2GB devices need a mandatory update, due to some firmware bugs. The firmware update was a breeze, but unfortunate a Windows only procedure.

When connected it's deteced as any ordinary USB-stick:

$ dmesg
...
[17185651.468000] usbcore: registered new driver usb-storage
[17185651.468000] USB Mass Storage support registered.
[17185651.468000] usb-storage: device found at 7
[17185651.468000] usb-storage: waiting for device to settle before scanning
[17185656.468000] usb-storage: device scan complete
[17185656.468000]   Vendor: DS-Xtrem  Model: e      isk        Rev:    
[17185656.468000]   Type:   Direct-Access                      ANSI SCSI revision: 00
[17185656.472000] SCSI device sdb: 4071424 512-byte hdwr sectors (2085 MB)
[17185656.472000] sdb: Write Protect is off
[17185656.472000] sdb: Mode Sense: 33 00 00 00
[17185656.472000] sdb: assuming drive cache: write through
[17185656.476000] SCSI device sdb: 4071424 512-byte hdwr sectors (2085 MB)
[17185656.476000] sdb: Write Protect is off
[17185656.476000] sdb: Mode Sense: 33 00 00 00
[17185656.476000] sdb: assuming drive cache: write through
[17185656.476000]  sdb: unknown partition table
[17185656.476000] sd 2:0:0:0: Attached scsi removable disk sdb
[17185656.476000] sd 2:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg1 type 0
[17185657.096000] FAT: utf8 is not a recommended IO charset for FAT filesystems, filesystem will be case sensitive!

$ df -h
...
/dev/sdb              2.0G  1.4G  639M  68% /media/DSX

After fiddling around with the DSX I needed to reset the DSX. I peeled off the label on the DSX and in the tiny hole there was two individual contacts. By connecting these two, the DSX was reset. Se picture to the right. After that I just needed to run the firmware upgrade utility and I was back on track.

So now it's time to find some good homebrews! A nice place to start:

http://www.ds-xtra.com/DS_Homebrew_Directory