So after about a week of playing with my Nintendo DS Lite and G6 Lite, the one thing i’ve noticed is the battery life. Its draining my NDS big time. All the reviews report that the G6 uses barely any power at all, so all signs point to the Passcard3 passme device.

The Passcard3 is placed in your DS game slot to allow you to execute NDS specific code. Without it, you can only run GBA games off of your flashcart. The problem is, it seems to be sucking the life out of my NDS.

So I decided to flash the firmware on my NDS with a modified firmware. Flashing the firmware essentially removes the need for the Passcard3. You are able to launch anything on your flashcart. The problem is, without anything in the NDS game slot, the NDS can’t sleep. It gets stuck in a weird loop. So to solve that, just keep a retail game or a dummy cart in that slot. Its better to plug the hole anyways, so its not open for dirt and dust.

Flashing the firmware is very simple. You just load an application called FlashMe, bridge 2 solder points, and you’re done. It takes all of 45 seconds to do the whole process. Afterwards, there is no need for the Passcard3. Instructions on how to do it are here.

So. What happened? I’ll tell ya. When using the G6 Lite and Passcard3 devices to launch games, I couldn’t let the NDS sleep over night without its battery being completely drained by morning. With my stock NDS Lite I was getting DAYs of playtime with one charge. I’d let it sleep and it was fine in the morning. After flashing, I now am back to normal battery life. The passcard3 was just sucking the LIFE out of my battery. I charged it up last night, played about 30-40 minutes,paused the game, closed it to put it to sleep, and let it sit all night. By morning, it still had a full battery icon in the NDS menu. Woo Hoo!! No more daily charging for me!

After trying to keep track of 5 postage stamp sized games, I got sick of it and ordered a G6 Lite and a Passcard. Without going off topic, they’re the perfect setup. If you’re looking for something like this, buy these 2 things.

But the problem was, my game saves were on the original games, not on my G6 Lite. Have no fear, its simple to solve. You can use your G6 Lite to transfer the game saves from your original game, to the G6 Lite. So lets do it.

1. Make sure the game you’re trying to retrieve a save from, is on your G6 Lite.
2. Boot up to the G6 Lite like normal with the passcard inserted.
3. Once booted into the loader, take the passcard out, and put the original game in.
4. Now choose the game you want the save for.
5. Press select, and choose your option.

Now, this where it gets tricky. If you have the chinese version, like me, you can’t read any of this. If you have the english version, it might still be confusing regarding what option to choose. So follow this little guide.

English Version

Original Game Cartridge to G6 Lite: DS -> DEFAULT
G6 Lite to Original Game Cartridge: DEFAULT -> DS

Chinese Version

Original Game Cartridge to G6 Lite: DS -> CHINESE CHARACTERS
G6 Lite to Original Game Cartridge: CHINESE CHARACTERS -> DS

So as far as the chinese version goes, just look for that DS part, and match up the side its on. Once you make your choice, the game save will be copied over to the appropriate destination and made available. Boo ya, all your old game saves usable again!

Here’s a picture showing what is what. I dont know what the others do, but that not was this post is about.

Its pretty darn hidden, but I actually found one.

Download Here

The protocol I was talking about, HTTP - it’s capable of all sorts of neat stuff that people ignore for some reason.

Continued

Tonight I gave a talk on Javascript Libraries at Refresh Richmond. I described what they are and why they’re so useful. It went pretty well. I was worried that I’d shoot over a lot of people’s heads, but from the people I talked to, it was right on point.

I fielded a ton of questions and got the feeling I introduced a lot of people to Prototype, Scriptaculous, and the idea of javascript libraries in general.

If you came to the talk and are looking for more information, I’ve posted some links below.

• Prototype
• Scriptaculous
• moo.fx

• Painless Javascript Using Prototype
• My Demo

Thomas Fuchs pointed out that Harald Martin Ström has created a very nice bundle for Textmate that provides support for our favorite Javascript libraries, Prototype & Script.aculo.us.

The bundles include snippets for Ajax, Events, Forms, Iterators, and even Effects. As noted by Thomas, it even has a “look-it-up-in-the-wiki” function, just highlight a word and hit Ctrl-Shift-H. Mmmm. Sexy.

Chris Anderson has created a rake library specific to subversion and Rails projects.

It has quite a few tasks, but the blessing he has bestowed upon us is svn:bootstrap. This task runs all the tedious svn commands you normally have to do by hand to a new Rails project. It will set all the usual ignore bits on /tmp and /log and will even set up a database.example.yal file for you big 2+ teams.

I was 10 minutes away from hacking my own up before finding this one. Thanks Chris!

Cease & Desist Gary Larson Style

After seeing hundreds of apps running on localhost this weekend, Anthony Eden and I decided that :3000 is the new :8080

So I figured I’d throw another t-shirt into the rails mix.

New Hotness:

As promised at the Rails Core panel Q & A on Sunday, 1.1.3 has been released.

Its a security update, suggested for everyone on 1.1.* So, basically, it shouldn’t break anything for anyone. Its totally backwards compatible.