SuperCard Mini SD Review

Introduction

The SuperCard was the second commercially available device to allow you to boot homebrew and backups on your Nintendo DS. Initially designed for GameBoy Advanced functionality only the SuperCard’s main coder Romman reverse engineered their only competitor’s over priced unit and started a revolution which was the main model other companies would follow when producing comparable products. You see, the SuperCard was the second product in it’s category to use low priced removable media compared to proprietary internal memory thus allowing you to store a great amount of content saving you much needed money.

So it’s only fair that the SuperCard Company would follow the recent trend of “smaller is better” by producing a new SuperCard humbly named the “SuperCard Mini SD”. It seems to be all the rage to have a smaller solution that doesn’t stick out of your console – so pardon me if I don’t agree because I personally believe that having electronic items protruding from my Nintendo DS makes me look like an uber geek, but of course I won’t let this minor aspect influence my review. I guess a lot of people would want a smaller solution otherwise the SuperCard team wouldn’t have produced one.

Features

Playback GBA/NDS/iQue Homebrew/Backups
The real size of GBA card
Build-in rechargeable battery design.
Work’s with the SuperPass v2 (only need to Setup at the first time)
Support all most 100% NDS games.
NDS GBA linkage function.
GBA Game Save more compatible because of the internal battery design
A new shell design, more beautiful than SD version.
Insert/Remove the MiniSD flash card w/o removing the SuperCard Mini SD
Compatible with GameBoy Advanced, GBA SP & the GBA Player
Compatible with Nintendo DS & Nintendo DS Lite

Contents

SuperCard Mini SD
SuperPass v2 Special Edition
SuperPass v2 Special Edition Programmer
USB Cable (Male to Male B)

The SuperCard has now been redesigned and is as advertised to be roughly the same size as an original GBA cart. This means it doesn’t stick out of your Nintendo DS console at all. The plastic casing it’s has also changed – it’s now a transparent purple with more emphasis on the transparency as you can clearly see the devices internal components through it. Of course the plastic is the same high quality/durable type used in the SuperCard CF & SD products.

However, if you’re not going to be flashing your console with the FlashMe BIOS or using the SuperCard on the Nintendo DS Lite you’re going to end up with the SuperPass v2 sticking out of your Nintendo DS anyway. The SuperPass v2 Special Edition is pretty bulky and is required to be used at least once as it “passes” the code stored on your SuperCard to the Nintendo DS slot thus allowing you to run it. Without this device you’d be out of luck and stuck with only GBA functionality.

Luckily, all you need to do is to run the device one and “program” your Nintendo DS with the FlashMe BIOS and you won’t need to use it again. The FlashMe BIOS does about the same thing as the SuperPass v2 Special Edition does, but actually replaces your Nintendo DS’s firmware and also protects you from Trojans hidden inside homebrew that can render your Nintendo DS useless.

Installation

Due to the products lack of included documentation you will have to hit up SuperCard’s homepage which contains a roughly translated user guide, the SuperCard PC Side Software and the SuperCard Kernel. Luckily, unlike one of their competitors the box (which is much better quality then the older packaging) includes their website address on it. The user guide itself is more confusing then helpful due to the fact it’s been translated from Chinese to English from someone who must be on some serious drugs – or just can’t translate for shit.

The SuperCard Software is easy enough to figure out on your own. So I proceeded to download the latest software in preparation of running the SuperCard Mini SD. While I was on the page I also downloaded the SuperPass v2.0 Special Edition software upgrade which I will talk about later as it’s only required when using a newer Nintendo DS and/or the Nintendo DS Lite.

In a nutshell, what you need to do to get the SuperCard up and running is to upgrade it to the latest Kernel, use the latest Software package and if you’re using a newer Nintendo DS upgrade and initialize the SuperPass v2 Special Edition.

I proceeded to place the new Kernel onto the Mini SD card and then placed it into the SuperCard. The Mini SD card fit snug into the SuperCard and was taken in perfectly by its spring loading mechanism. Due to rumors surrounding the new generation of Mini SD devices I then inserted and removed the Mini SD card over 200 times and the spring didn’t break. Rumor squashed.

Sadly, all I got on boot up was two white screens of death. I figured this was most likely due to the fact my Mini SD card was formatted using FAT32 so I reformatted it using FAT16 and it worked. So just like its predecessor you’re limited to 2GB of space. Darn!

Once it booted I was greeted by the normal SuperCard menu. Where’s the new one advertised in its specifications? I then picked to boot the Kernel file and it restarted the Nintendo DS into GBA mode and then asked me if I wanted to upgrade. It took around twenty two seconds to program and then rebooted the console back into Nintendo DS mode, but it still had the lousy old menu! Big disappointment there!

Installation – Image Preparation

Next it came time to prepare some backups for use with the SuperCard. So I installed the PC Software and loaded it up, but it displayed it all wrong! Half of the menu was cutoff, but this is something they might not have thought of before hand. You see, I run my computer at 1600×1200 resolution with large fonts turned on. So if you’re creating software you will have to include a check to see if large fonts are turned on and compensate for this. Oh well, for the sake of the review I had to set my resolution back to 1024×768 and turn large fonts off.

The software itself is pretty much straight forward and very simple. You first start up with a menu where you can select which images you wish to convert and also have an options tab to toggle various options which will effect game play including: Saver Patch, Enable Restart, Enable Add Cheat and Enable Real Time Save.

Let’s look over what each one of these do, but before this you must realize that each option will eat up a bit of memory and can be detrimental when trying to playback GBA games. If you use too many options your GBA games will slow down to the point where you can barely play them. (See my GBA comments further down).

Saver Patch – You will most likely want to leave this one selected as this is what will enable saving your game progress.

Enable Restart – This is more of a luxury then anything and will allow you to restart your console via a key combination so you don’t have to power cycle (turn it off and on) it. I’d say turn this off to save memory. This option has to be selected if you’re going to be using the Real Time Save (RTS) feature.

Enable Add Cheat – Since I am totally against cheating I would never think of using this option. Cheating in games ruins their value, but I guess if you can’t play a game for shit or actually think you’ve beaten a game because you finished it while cheating then this option can be turned on.

Enable Real Time Save – This is a handy option especially since you might have to turn your console off on short notice. Basically, you can save your game at any point in time and then resume from where you save it from. Like I mentioned above if you select this option the Enable Restart will be enabled by default. No way around this.

Once you’ve select the default options you can proceed to add games to the list to be converted. I started with the few Nintendo DS backups I have of my own original carts. Once you’ve selected as many images as your heart desires they are all added to the list. The first thing you’ll notice is that “Save” (RTS) and “Cheat” are deselected as these two options aren’t supported in Nintendo DS mode.

To further configure your options you can right click on a game and select “Properties” which brings up a menu where you can pick the Save Position, ROM Patch Position, Restart, Trim ROM, Faster Gameplay, iQue Game and Enable GBA Union. Once again let’s look over these options.

Save Position – This tells the SuperCard where to place the EEPROM (Save Game Data). By default its set to put it on the Mini SD card, but you can change it to save it onto the Nintendo DS cart you have inserted if you’d like to. There isn’t much need to save it onto the cart and it’s a bitch to get off the cart so I’d leave it alone.

ROM Patch Position – This will determine where the ROM is patched to. If you set it to the SuperCard it will not “Quick Load” the ROM, but loads it very slowly. The only reason you might need to use this is for problem games that refuse to work using the SD Card to boot from.

Restart – This will enable/disable the ability to restart your Nintendo DS while playing a game. Unlike in GBA mode this doesn’t effect the speed of the game so it’s safe to leave it set to ON, but you might have to turn it off if the game itself doesn’t work with it turned on.

Trim ROM – This will cut off any extra blank space in the game you’re using to save you space on your Mini SD card. Due to the fact the game’s are originally stored on ROM chips with a set size each game will be a set size, but not all of them use up all of this space so you can select to remove the “filler” data.

Faster Gameplay – This setting will mess with Direct Memory Access (DMA) options and will produce “faster” reading times during games. This option isn’t necessarily needed unless you’re running into slowdown. The only time I’ve ever run into slowdown was during the playback of Full Motion Video (FMV) sequences.

iQue Game – Just incase you’re an unlucky owner of the Nintendo DS iQue you can select this to let the console know it’s an iQue. The iQue is a Nintendo DS produced outside of the USA in a select region.

Enable GBA Union – I have no idea what this option does. Your feedback on this review would be appreciated to let me know what this does!

Once you’ve selected which options you wish to use simply press to “Out” button which will start writing the games to the path you’ve configured (or not configured) in the main options menu. It would be best to set this path to your Mini SD card. I always create a folder/directory named “NintendoDS” on my cards to store the Nintendo DS games in.

After it finished converting the images I checked the Mini SD card to see what had been created. What I found was two files per game – one was the main patch game with a .DSQ extension and the other was the save data file with an extension of .SAV. All kept their original long filenames as it was only the extension that differed. One cool feature of the SuperCard Mini SD is that it will display the long filenames instead of the short ones like a competitors product does.

Next I went to load some GBA backups and instead of them instantly popping up on the screen a small menu box came up and said “Please Wait”. I’m guessing that it has to go through and read each ROM image and detect certain values before it can convert them like the type of save data the game uses. Just like the Nintendo DS the GBA games have their own options you can set per game. You can actually set a lot of them so here’s a list and their definitions.

Enable Save – Like the Nintendo DS option this must be enabled for you to actually save your game progress. It’s stored on the Mini SD card.

Import Saver from File – Same as the Nintendo DS. This allows you to import older save data from your backups (if you’ve made any *hint*).

Enable More Save – This will pad the save file to 256k. I’m still not sure why you’d need to do this.

Enable Real Time Save – Enable the RTS functionality of the SuperCard Mini SD.

Enable More Real Timer Saver – Once again, this pads the file to a larger size.

Use External IPS File – This will allow you to use an external IPS which is patched onto the game. IPS files alter your game in various ways. There are some IPS files which add “trainers” which are basically cheats, some that patch the game to actually work and some that will translate the game into another language. This is a very handy option to use.

Enable Compress – This will compress the ROM image saving you space on your Mini SD card, but then it will take longer to initially load.

Enable Restart – Enable the ability to restart your console without having to physically turn the power off then on again.

Enable Add Text File – This will append a text file to your rom image allowing you to view it from the SuperCard’s menu. This is handy if you have a FAQ of a game and want to read up on it.

Enable Cheat – This option will enable the “cheat” mode. The SuperCard Mini SD comes with a large cheat file database based on the scene release number of your particular game. Once you enable this option you can select the external file then toggle the cheats off/on, add, edit and delete them.

Once I had selected the basic “Enable Save” button I then converted some of my personal backups. The conversion process was quick and painless. Now I have some Nintendo DS and Game Boy Advanced images ready to go it’s time to setup and SuperPass v2 Special Edition.

Installation – The SuperPass v2 Special Edition

The SuperPass v2 Special Edition is basically the same hardware as the original one, but it comes in a new shell design colored black and features a better switch as the older ones switches were easy to break. The process of initializing the SuperPass v2 Special Edition is only required if you are an owner of a newer Nintendo DS or a DS Lite. The process itself is a bit complicated, but once it’s done you won’t have to mess with it again.

Basically, what you’ll be doing is programming the SuperPass v2 Special Edition with an SRAM file that corresponds to the original Nintendo DS game you’ll be using. This requires the USB cable it comes with to power the console, the original cartridge and a parallel port cable for the transmission of the data.

I’m not sure why they didn’t use the USB interface to actually do the communication with as most modern computers don’t even come with a parallel port! Additionally, if you’ve never used your parallel port you’re most likely going to need to do some tweaking of your computer’s BIOS settings to get it working.

Okay, let’s start! Remember, if you’re using an older Nintendo DS don’t worry about this process. To check to see if you have an older Nintendo DS just insert your Mini SD card into the SuperCard, insert an original game into the SuperPass v2 Special Edition and then plug them both in your console and turn it on. If you get the SuperCard menu you can skip the rest of this stuff and scroll down to its general usage.

What I did first was to obtain the latest revision of the SuperPass v2 Special Edition’s software. Next I flipped the little switch to the right thus turning the SuperPass v2 Special Edition into “programming mode”. After this I plugged the SuperPass v2 Special Edition into the programming module and then connected the USB and parallel port cables.

Next I ran the software which came up with a list of “Boot Games”. The “Boot Game” is the original game you’ll be using/inserting into the SuperPass v2 Special Edition which will allow it to operate. To find your game simply look on the back of it and find it’s serial number and then match that up with the file on the list. Next, in the right hand corner I had to select the memory offset that my parallel port is pointed to. If you’re not sure which one it’s on just try them all and hopefully one with work. Luckily, one did work for me.

If one didn’t work I would have had to reboot my computer and hold ESC (or whatever gets me into the BIOS) and find the parallel port settings and change the memory offset and DMA, reboot and try it again. If it still didn’t work I would have had to keep doing this until I found a working combination. At the end if I tried all of the combinations and it still didn’t work I would have had to try another computer. Like I said – I have no idea why they just didn’t use the USB interface to program it with.

Next, using the serial number from the original “Boot Game” I had to manually navigate to the directory/folder which the SuperPass v2 Special Edition’s software was installed to and find the .gba and .sav files named the same as the serial number. Next I had to copy these into the root directory of the Mini SD card.

Once I had the files on the Mini SD card I inserted it onto the SuperCard and turned the Nintendo DS on. Note that the only thing in the Nintendo DS at this point in time was the SuperCard. Next I unplugged the SuperPass v2 Special Edition from the programmer and inserted the “Boot Game” into it and then set it aside.

Now, the SuperCard’s GBA menu was up and running and I ran the .gba file I just put on the Mini SD Card. Next I inserted the SuperPass v2 Special Edition (while the power was still on) then turned off the Nintendo DS and then turned it back on. Finally, the SuperPass v2 Special Edition was initialized. I turned off the console and flipped the switch back and was good to go.

Oh, if you want to reprogram the SuperPass v2 Special Edition to work in its factory state you can do the above process with the “SuperPass 1” selection/files. Simply pick the SuperPass 1 selection from the programming software and then pick the PASS .gba and .sav files from the programs directory to use in the above process.

Usage

Okay, now comes the fun part – actually playing your homebrew and backups. One last thing I did before testing was to obtain a bunch of homebrew games and applications (including the MoonShell media player) and placed them in a directory on the Mini SD card humbly named “Homebrew”.

To boot the SuperCard Mini SD all you do is insert the SuperPass v2 Special Edition into the Nintendo DS cartridge slot and insert the SuperCard Mini SD into the GBA slot. Next turn the console on! Once it’s on you’ll be greeted by the SuperCard logo on the bottom screen and the Menu interface on the top screen.

There are four options from the Main Menu which are List, Saver, Options and Help. Help simply displays a text file with some general hints and the options menu will let you toggle between automatically loading your save data and the emulator options. I’ll get to the emulator stuff in a little bit.

Since I was a bit clueless about the “more saver” options I went to the “saver” option first. I selected a save file and figured it out! “More Saver” will let you have more save slots per game. You can actually go into the .save file and backup the save file to one of four slots. Pretty nifty!

Okay, now it was time to test out the images. I had heard some rumors that the SuperCard Mini SD had *broken* some homebrew so the first thing I did was to load up MoonShell. Luckily it worked! MoonShell, if you haven’t a clue is the most widespread and commonly used multimedia player for the Nintendo DS. Using it you can playback a vast array of music formats, view text files, look at images and watch movies. I won’t get much into MoonShell, but if you Google it you’ll find all kinds of information about the program.

So everything was good so far. Next I tried ten different homebrew applications. All of them worked out fine. So I’m not sure about compatibility issues – there may be some, but the selection I picked worked. If you’re going to be using emulators I would suggest picking up PicoDrive DS so you can enjoy Sega Genesis games.

Next I moved on to test the GBA images. Sadly, the “slowdown” issue with the previous versions of the SuperCard hardware hasn’t been resolved. Even with just the “saver” option packed games experienced slow to major slowdown during times when there was a lot of action going on. Needless to say I was disappointed and will add this to my list of devices to not recommend for GBA playback.

After that it was time to test the Nintendo DS backups and they all worked great! No slowdown or anything of that nature. I’d say if you’re in the market for a Nintendo DS only device that this one will suite your needs just fine. All of the games played and saved fine. No complaints from this side!

Usage – Emulators

The SuperCard Firmware contains a few homebrew emulators in its internal organs. All you need to do to play Nintendo Entertainment System, Game Boy Mono, PC Engine and/or Sega Master System/Game Gear games is to place their ROM files on the Mini SD card and select them. The Nintendo DS will reboot into GBA mode and will let you play the games. Compatibility wise the emulators work great, but sadly aren’t the most recent versions. If you’re looking to run the most recent versions I would check out their respective homepages which I’ve linked to at the bottom of this review.

Sadly, I wanted to run the newest version of Goomba which is a Game Boy Mono and Color emulator, but it wouldn’t work! So I guess those compatibility issues were true. I’m not sure what’s going on, but I was a bit depressed to find out I can’t play my GameBoy Color games on the go. Hopefully the SuperCard Team can address this issue with a future update.

Usage – Media Player

The SuperCard boasts that it has the capability to playback multimedia files such as music, movies, pictures and books. I would cover this, but due to my ethical standings on the way they go about this I won’t be covering the processes. You see – the SuperCard Team has ripped the Crystal Engine Media Player from the M3 Team and has included it with their product. Not only is it an older version, but due to its integration with the M3 it’s missing some vital features and functionality. If you’re going to be using the SuperCard to view multimedia content I would stick with MoonShell.

Conclusion

Due to the slowdown present within GBA games I wouldn’t purchase this if you want this sort of functionality. I would however considering purchasing the SuperCard for Nintendo DS as its works flawlessly in this department. Including the emulators was also a bonus. Additionally, the smaller form factor of the card was made for those of you who don’t want something sticking out of your Nintendo DS. As of this review there are two similar products and I’d list this one at the bottom of the list.

Negatives

Slowdown in GBA Games
SuperPass Setup Process
Lack of Included Documentation
Homebrew Compatibility Issues

Positives

Reasonable Price
Great Nintendo DS Compatibility
Simple, yet easy to use Menu System
Multiple save files per game
Small Form Factor

Links

SuperCard WebSite
Shop@01Media - Official Worldwide ReSeller