After oh all much struggling, I finally got my Nintendo DS, and my first 4 hours of messing with it was very positive an experience. I also perform seemingly horrible stunt with it, which I hightly recommanded you NOT to do so. I am going to disclose all these right here.
First, buying the console. It was HK$970, which was a pretty OK price, but I thought I should get cheaper because I brought the gray market version (even though it claims that there's a 18 month warrently). This gear is meant for Japanese use only, and has a 110V adapter. This is actually fine with me because I need a 110V adapter for use when I get back to US anyway.
The whole reason I was willing to settle with a gray market version was because I want to use PassMe to play games on my SuperCard. And at least in Hong Kong, the offical NDS has long gone the batch of console that works with PassMe. Sure there are a rumor that a universal PassME will be release at the end of Oct, but I was not sure if it's just a rumor or lot, thus trying to make sure that I got a version of console that works.
So here what I purchased:
- NDS Console : HK$970
- Screen Protector: HK$70
- NintenDog, US version: HK$240
- PassMe: HK$130
After I got my console, I instantly went to McDonald, sat there and test out the machine for 30 minutes. Everything works as expected. Games on SuperCard worked, my NintenDog worked. NintenDog save game worked OK. The touchscreen worked great. No dead pixels and stuff. Microphone, which NintenDog, worked great. All was well.
And then this morning I woke up at 5:15 am. Yeah, like a kid after on a boxing day morning. HOnestly I was not woke up because the urge to play Nintendo DS. It just happened that I woke up. So what better I should do :-D
Then, a tiny sign of problem: I started Electroplankton from my SuperCArd, and after the main screen showed up, I briefly toggled the headphone/speaker setting by touching on the screen when suddenly the screen freeze. In a slight panic, I turned off the machine, and turned it on again. Everything seemed to back to normal after then, and I cannot replicate the problem again.
Then, a second brave and scary moment: I sort of read about the saving trick about NDS, and it seems to imply that I can remove PassMe during the middle of game session. That sort of made sense to me since the PassMe trick is for redirectly memory access from NDS card to GBA Cartidge. So while in the middle of Wario Touch (which I loaded from SuperCard), I pulled out PassMe. Instantly the console was turned off. Being puzzled, I put back the SuperCard and turned on the machine again. The machine was on normal, and I can start the WarioTouch form SuperCArd again, but here' the scary part: when I close the lid of the console, instead of going back to the regular quite SAVE mode, it started making beep beep beep sound, and by slightly opening the cover, I could see that the two screen were BLINKING with a pure white screen! NOT GOOD. Well, I tried running NintenDog, and found that closing the lid still bring the NintenDog to quite SAFE code. But when I put back the PassMe and loaded Wario Touch, SAFE mode with cover closed still creating beeping noise. I forgot exactly how I solved the problem, but it was kind of like bootup SuperCard with NO PassMe, play a while GBA games, turn off the machine, plug in PassMe. And now the bleeping thing was finally gone. Woooop. Scary.
Through this process, I found that:
- SuperCard with NDS games supports Sleep mode.
- NDS game carts supports Sleep mode.
- All GBA GAmes (even with SuperCArd) DOES NO support sleep mode.
My next quest will be trying to see how far the sleep mode can preserve the state of the machine. I have it charge while still having Wario Touch in sleep mode. We'll see.
