NDSTT And R4SDHC For Nintendo DS Lite

It’s Christmas and my kids are to the ages that they want to play games, since many of their school friends and cousins have the little Nintendo DS Lites, they asked Santa for themselves too. On the market now, the price is pretty standard, $129 for DS Lite and $149 for DSI. Microcenter and Craigslists do have these refurbished or good used one for about half of the new ones. I decided to get used ones for my kids since they will scratch, drop, and misuse them somehow. I found two used ones with the color that each of my kids like: Pink and Blue for the price of a brand new one.

I read on the internet, they do have these game cart that allow us to load videos, music mp3 to these little microsd memories. My daughter loves these music videos from youtubes and I can download and convert to the Nintendo DS format for playing.

There are many types of game carts, I tried both of them, NDSTT and R4SDHC, the new version now support 8GB to 32GB MicroSD. Each video depends on length, the size is about 20Mb to 300Mb full length movie. Well, since it’s a game player, these games can be saved to a format that these carts can read and play. Instead of carry many games cartridges, we can put them on the MicroSD memories and play them.

NDSTT ($7-$15)

Most of the carts should come with some type of MicroSD USB adaptors to plug directly into computers for data installing or tranferring. In this case, we use SD adaptor to plug in one of those media readers. Make sure the media readers can read SDHC which greater 2GB capacity. USB adaptors are better because they can read all MicroSD, make sure we ask for the MicroSD USB adaptor when buying any of these NDSTTs or R4SDHCs.

The next one we need is to download the firmware to place in our NDSTT. NDSTT only has 1 website compares to R4SDHC, they may have their own firmware for each different products. We tried to use a MicroSD from one R4 to another one, and it didn’t work. The one we bought is NOT the “i” which support DSi games. Therefore, the lastest version of software is V1.18. The process of installing the software is extremely simple, everything will be downloaded, extracted, and copied to our 8GB MicroSD memory, then just plug it into the NDSTT cartridge and it’s ready to go. In order to play media files, we need a software called Moonshell and the latest version is MoonshellV2.10. If this link is somehow not there, just google it, and it will come up.

NDSTT V1.18 Firmware

This version has YSMenu built in which is very good little program. The problem with the original TTmenu doesn’t work with Moonshell V2.10 and only works with V1.71 as it has on the website and the V2.10 is much better in graphics display. The whole V1.18 firmware consists of 2 files and 1 folder.

We want to use YSmenu and Moonshell V2.10 because the V1.18 firmware can’t be returned from V2.10. We also will have an option to go to V1.18 display if we want from the YSmenu. Let me explain, the YSmenu has a different display of icons compares to V1.18 display which my kids may like it better. So the way we install the firmware is this.

First turn on the DS Lite, YSmenu will load.

From YSmenu, games and ndsttv1.18 and moonshellv2.10 will display so we can choose which applications to use.

From ndsttv1.18, games and YSmenu and moonshellv2.10 will display so we can choose which applications to use.

From moonshellv2.10 can only go back to firmware by YSmenu.

SETTING UP YSMENU AS DEFAULT MENU

Make a copy of TTMENU.DAT and rename V1.18 TTMENU.DAT to dstt18.nds (this one will show the menu of v1.18)

Rename the TTMENU.DAT to TTMENU18.DAT in case we need to use it again.

Click to open the TTMENU folder, copy the TTmenu.nds to the root folder, this is the YSmenu that we want the firmware to boot to when we turn on the machine.

Rename it as “TTMENU.DAT” in the root of the MicroSD card.

Now, if we plug the MicroSD in the NDSTT cartridge and turn on the DS, we should see the V1.18 boot up with the YSmenu display and NOT the original V1.18 firmware which looks like this

YSMenu will loaded default with the brightness set to 1, and file delete function enable (we don’t want the kids to accidentally delete files so we need to turn it off), we want to change it to the brightest = 3 at default, so we need to edit the YSMenu.ini file inside the TTMENU folder. For the delete disable, we need to change NO_DEL=true instead of “false” default.

We want to change the YSMenu background to princess belle background for our daughter. The background images in YSMenu are the YSMENU1.bmp and YSMENU2.bmp in the TTMENU folder. We downloaded the skins from the HAPPYDONE website. Open the skin folder and copy the bgup.bmp and bgdown.bmp to the folder and rename them to YSMENU1.bmp for top screen and YSMENU2.bmp for bottom screen.

If we want to use the NDSTT V1.18 original skins, we need to copy the skins folder to the skin folder in the TTMENU folder, rename the skin folder we want to use to “default”.

Now we can load the games, movies, mp3 music, MoonshellV2.10 in the root of the MicroSD card. To install the moonshellV2.10, extract the zip file downloaded, click the setup icon application, it will ask for the location of the MicroSD card, the best is to rename the generic name to a specific name like in our case, it’s AUDIEDS.

Check “more” for more options like languages and folders to be created.

We tried all the loading files and we deleted the 2 that we don’t use which are the 2 v2.10 recommended. We use moonshl2.nds to execute moonshellv2.10.

In order for the Moonshell V2.10 to return to firmware YSMenu, we have to modify the ttio.nds in the moonshell resetmse folder. First copy the TTMenu.nds (YSMenu) file from the TTMENU folder to the moonshl2/resetmse folder, rename or delete the ttio.nds, then rename the TTMenu.nds to ttio.nds.