Pile of Nintendo DS game cartridges.
Note: If this is posted twice it is because the first one was eaten by WordPress and it may or may not post along with this rewrite.
About a year ago I bought a CycloDS Evolution for my Nintendo DS Lite. I wanted to check out the homebrew scene and look for a free web browser for the DS. Nothing really jumped out at me from the world of DS homebrew but I found a better use for the Micro SD adapter card.
Nintendo DS ROMs. These are the contents of the DS game cartridge that are put onto a computer into a .nds file. Conveniently cards like the CycloDS can play them when they are put onto the MicroSD card. This of course leads to many of the games being pirated. I try to avoid that and only download the ROMs of games I currently own.
Or games that I am thinking about owning. With a lot of DS games they are either fun (Super Mario 64 DS) or have the fun potential but for some reason it does not follow through (the new Pokémon). Tired of buying games that don’t interest me I saw the usage of ROMs to be the perfect answer, an opportunity to demo a game for an hour or so and then decide if I want to buy it.
The temptation of course is to not buy it since one already has a copy of the game. Recently I downloaded and tried out Knights in the Nightmare by Atlus, I liked it and the next day I bought the game. Even though I now own a legitimate copy of the game I am going to keep playing it solely on my CycloDS.
Why? Mostly because I already have an hours worth of game on the ROM version and because it is so much more versatile. I can back up my savegames to my computer along with the game itself, I don’t have to carry the game around with me and there is a much smaller chance of losing a digital copy.
If there was an easy way to get the saves off of the DS games I bought prior to the CycloDS I would not need to carry around any of the game cartridges with me and could rest them right next to my original brick of a Gameboy.
