User avatar
intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Tue Mar 03, 2020 10:09 am

Last week a local friend of mine posted (behind a walled-garden) a shot of his Nintendo 3DS sporting - to my shock - a C64 screen on the top screen and a tidy keyboard on the bottom screen.

I immediately had to know what I was looking at. I recently nearly pulled the trigger on the Sony PSP to achieve the same ends.

My house is filled with Nintendo handhelds, so naturally I'd much rather use the devices I own and get one of those set up with some Commodore goodness that go down a whole new hardware path.

I've been beta testing the new Doublesided Games RPG-lite game Hired Sword 2 (much more on this very soon), and having the game on a mobile device would really allow a lot more opportunities to keep hackin' and slashin' at bugs. One of the other members on the team does this for their testing environment, and it filled me with envy. It's very cool.

Anyway, in order for this to work, you have to acquire a small device that is not hard to find but can be a little bit spendy called the SuperCard DSTwo.
IMG_6201.jpg
This is what the card looks like while resting dormantly on a speckled office table.

supercard-dstwo-1.jpg
It provides a lot of firepower in the card you slap in the back of your DS.

Rydian via gbatemp.net:
It is a device that has the same look and shape as a DS game cart (and goes into the same slot), but it's unofficial, and it has a MicroSD slot to store your ROMs and homebrew.
It's main selling feature is that it can be inserted in a DS (or NDS or GBA, and now new versions even support the 3DS) and can run literally thousands of DS, GBA, SNES cartridge ROMs. It has all kinds of plugins for it.

Someone has even created a C64 emulator for it that I've fired up on it as well.
ESMsKRnUUAAvKmK.jpg
OMG I'm close to C= glory.

ESMsKRrU0AAnvOw.jpg
I have to use my glasses to read this tiny screen, but I'm OK with that.

I need to see if I can better understand how to actually install, mount and run disks and d64 files. In the first few minutes of use I definitely can write simple basic programs...slowly, and rather painfully. Fingers crossed this emulator is much deeper than that!

User avatar
Zippy Zapp
CA, USA

Posted Wed Mar 04, 2020 12:56 pm

Oh that is cool. I have several flash cards from the past 10+ years from when I started using them with the GBA (EasyFlash III and IV) and I have a couple of DS ones too. I didn't realize they had a C64 emulator. That is something I will have to download.

I think the newest card I have is an R4 Revolution for DS. I don't have anything that works in a 3DS but it doesn't matter because we have no less then 3 DS Lites in our house.

I also have a SuperCard (GBA) and a SuperKey that allows it to run DS games. I don't use either of those though because it is not the best way to do it.

Thanks for sharing.

User avatar
intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Wed Mar 04, 2020 2:11 pm

I did some preliminary research on the C64 emulator that came with my card.

It's an old version of Frodo, and it's overall pretty sucky. It only reads d64 files, and most of them fail when trying to load.

From what I've read, I'm way better off installing VICE on this device and going from there. On top of that, the resolution on the DSi is so small, it's really only going to handle games that don't rely on text.

The 3DS really does seem the way to go.

I'm going to continue experimenting with all of this and will report back the best overall setup.

The card I got DOES work beautifully with SNES cartridge ROMs on the DS, though, which is super bad ass.
dkc-on-the-ds.jpeg
dkc-on-the-ds2.jpeg
There is some vertical clipping. The SNES is actually a bit taller than the DS' screen, and that gets entirely cut off rather than squishing it to fit the smaller size.
snes-vs-ds.jpg
For example, in DKC the banana counter is missing the top half. But it's very playable and sounds gorgeous. Pretty danged cool.





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