Sometimes it’s hard to find something to keep you occupied the train during that long commute home at night. Like many commuters I see on the train everyday, some like to keep themselves occupied with handheld games such as the Nintendo DS and Sony PSP. Well, today’s review is about a product that can help you save time and space with your Nintendo DS. It’s a great little system that can fit in your pants or jacket pocket, but bringing around a bunch of games to play, can be a hassle. Enter the CycloDS Evolution, a device that will allow you to carry all of your games on one cartridge as well a perform a few other neat tasks.

The CycloDS Evolution is a device that allows you to use a MicroSD memory card to play game backups, look at pictures, listen to music and even read e-books. It can be purchased from a variety of online retailers for around $55. It doesn’t come with the MicroSD memory card, but one can easily be purchased online from Newegg and they are relatively inexpensive. So lets jump right into it. Let me also preface this review with the fact that every game image file for that is used

Unboxing

The unit comes in a small aluminum tin with the product logo, which is better packing than I expected. In the tin are two things, the CycloDS Evolution cartridge which looks identical to any other Nintendo DS game, and the USB MicroSD card reader, which was a nice surprise even though the 8GB card I purchased came with a reader. The downside, there are no manuals or instructions on how to use the unit at all (before I notice the MicroSD slot on the USB adapter, I though it was a flash drive.)

Setup

Here comes the most difficult part, getting the CyclosDS setup to actually start playing games. When you insert the cartridge into the DS and power it on, the systems thinks that its just a game called CyclosDS Evolution and you simply select it to get started. If you insert the cartridge without a MicroSD card, the software will simply tell you to power down and install the memory card.

Once the software finishes loading you are presented with three icons, representing games, media, and settings. This screen is skinnable, and you can find more themes to download from a site called NDSthemes. I personally chose what I thought was a cleaner interface called Minima Black. Without having added any files to the MicroSD memory card, the system is still pretty useless. The only thing you can do is change a few options in the settings screen.

Next comes getting the games from your PC onto the CycloDS. The game images come in a thoughful file extension .NDS, and they can be obtained in various places on the internet. All game images I used were titles that I already legally purchased and still have. Well here’s where the lack of documentation comes in to play. Being an advanced PC user (who probably wouldn’t have read the manual anyway,) I figured I would just hook the MicroSD card up to my PC and drag the files into the root directory and they would load the next time I booted the CyclosDS up. Wrong. After many failed attempts in which the software just wouldn’t see any games as being installed, I decided to go to the CycloDS support page. It turns out you need to patch each .NDS file using their CycloDS ROM patcher. Once you download and install the patcher, you run the software and tell it which .NDS files you would like to patch. Once complete you have have 2 additional files with the same file name as the .NDS with different extensions. You will need to drag all three files for each game onto your MicroSD card before the CyclosDS software will recognize there is a game installed.

Now you’re all set, and you can start playing games.