The R4 DS Revolution for the Nintendo DS was released and made available some 4 years ago in order to allow you to play your freeware / open source and home brew games on your Nintendo DS.  Since that time there have been many improvements to the R4 DS Revolution, including support for the newest Nintendo DSi consoles.

When the R4 DS hit the market many years ago, it was alone in a very special place as prior to its release, there were no other slot 1 flash cards available for the Nintendo DS system.  The only other way to play open source and homebrew games on the Nintendo DS at the time was by using a SuperCard SD or similar card and adding to it the PassKey or SuperKey in order to use it to play NDS homebrew files. 

There reallyw asn’t an issue with this except that the cartridge would always stick out of the NDS system itself, because it used the slot 2 in your Nintendo DS.  More annoying than that though was the fact that you always had to convert each and every file before being able to use it. This was a limitation of the cards, because they were originally made to play GBA games, and not Nintendo DS games, this was something that was accepted – however begrudgingly.

The R4 changed all of that. Perhaps that is why the Revolution was put into the name, because it was the first card of its kind that actually looked and felt like a regular Nintendo DS card. And definitely the first card that was able to make use of very inexpensive Micro SD Card flash media for storing and loading your games, something that had just not been done before.

There is however much more that the R4 DS Revolution has brought in terms of features, other than just the feel and look of the menu. It completely simplified the loading of your homebrew games and and applications. How easy? So easy that you have to do little more than select the files your want on your micro SD Card and drag and drop them, then load them up. The R4 DS means no converting of your files before you get to play them. This is good both for gamers as well as the developers who now only have to make one version of their downloadable software available.

It was the R4 DS that truly brought real homebrew to the Nintendo DS system. And thank goodness it did. Not in the leat because when the DSi was released, there was no more slot 2 for the GBA flash cards that had been used prior. You were no longer able to use GBA flash cards like the supercard SD in your Nintendo DS console to play your homebrew game and applications. Without a card like the R4 DS Revolution, you would not be playing your homebrew games today…. and that is something that would be a horrible situation.