Kirri's Beginning R4DS Users Page

Updated as of June 09

The R4DS is a DS flash cart. Flash cartridges look like normal DS games in their physical cartridge form. However, there is a slot in the back for a miniSD chip.
Anyway, you're not here to read that, and I'm not here to describe it for you. If you honestly care, read the Wikipedia article here.

Wikipedia's Page On DS Flash carts

Onto the business!

Assuming you have an R4 and a miniSD card (miniSDs are absolutely essential and not sold with the R4 normally), you can't just drag and drop yet.

If you bought the R4, it came with a blue cart holder, a USB 2.0 MicroSD Reader, and a pretty leetle blue lanyard. You're going to need to paste the firmware (like the software of the R4 card) onto the miniSD card.

"HOW DO I DO THIS?"

you say. Well, to get the software, it either came on a small CD in your R4 box, or you can get it on the web.

I recommend using the latest firmware. The problem is, as of July 2008, the R4 site appears to be down. You can go to what appears to be the main R4DS site here. This download on Butterdog will still remain up as a mirror site. You can also download old versions of firmware on the main R4 site. However, I made this site to upload a place to get the firmware and all the other stuff that needs to be pasted on there. I got them off torrents, but they didn't come with any text files explaining who had uploaded them, so at the moment they remain uncredited.

Please note that R4DS firmware should be free and readily available for anyone who needs to download it. There's nothing illegal about providing something that's normally free (unless you're making people pay for it)(AND IN THIS CONTEXT, LANDON, YOU PEST!).

Anyway! Put your miniSD card into your USB MicroSD reader, and plug it into your comp.

See the file that says English? You need to extract it with Winrar or another zip tool and paste the _system_, moonshl, _DS_menu, and _DS_MSHL_ folders and files into your Removable Disk drive in My Computer.

R4 Firmware v1.18 English Rar

GAMES

First thing's first.

R4 Rom Trimmer

This file will make any NDS game files slightly smaller. We're going to assume you already have an NDS game downloaded. Load it into the Rom Trimmer and it'll paste a copy of your game with _trim appended to the old filename. It'll go into the folder the original NDS file is in.

Now that you have that one game trimmed, you're going to click into the _system_ file on your miniSD. Create a new folder. Call it GAMES. Don't you dare go calling it anything else. Paste the trimmed folder there.

Rinse and repeat for any other NDS files.

SKINS

People seem to have a lot of problems with skins. I know I did. Anyway.

Find a site with a specifically R4 skin on it. Here's a good site.

Download one of those, and go into your _system_ folder. Make a folder called themes. It has to be THEMES, nothing else- like how the games folder was specifically named. In this folder, you can make as many files as you need to. Name them theme01, theme02, theme03. You get the idea. Remember the zero. For each skin, post the corresponding files into that folder.

How can I switch them on the DS? Simply press your SELECT button on the R4 menu.

More to come, when I get around to it.

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