This Is the Perfect Nintendo DS Flashcart

If you want to play video games on real hardware, but don’t want to carry around all of your cartridges everywhere you go, you’ll want a flashcart. That will store a whole bunch of roms, so you can load up whatever game you want. And there are many flashcarts on the market, but they all have faults. That’s why the folks at LNH Team created the DSpico, which may just be the perfect Nintendo DS flashcart.

Before even getting to the features, you already know this is a compelling product because it is open source and built around a Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller. That means that the community can hack it, mod it, and continue to support it — even if LNH Team dissolves in the future. That’s a big deal in a world full of unsupported hardware from defunct developers.

But the features are also great. You can switch between bootloaders on the fly, which is awesome if you have both a DS and a 3DS. It reads at crazy speeds from a microSD card, but you can also plug in a USB cable to copy rom files directly from a PC. It consumes very little power (57mW on average). It has its own special DSPico software, complete with a nifty customizable launcher. There is even an infrared communication feature, which is a requirement for getting the full experience from some games.

The best feature, however, is the price. It is just $19.99 for a pre-order of the pre-assembled unit. That’s a ridiculously low price for such a feature-packed flashcart. And because it is open source, you can build your own if you’d prefer.

If you want a complete overview of the DSpico, Macho Nacho Productions has a fantastic video that goes into all the details.