#mt card

[guyghoul]

An noying pattern

An uncomfortable speculation regarding the Gateway 3DS comes up.

Commoner (from GBATemp) gives a valid counterargument.

The original speculation spread throughout GBATemp regardless.

The original speculation becomes a so-called fact.

This is the reason why I am sticking to the Gateway 3DS after all this; the rumours are essentially overblown speculation.

[guyghoul]

Stuff about the Gateway 3DS

To those Tumblrs who actually use DS ond1 3DS flashcards, you probably now about how the Gateway 3DS lets you play almost every 3DS game from a ROM backup. (The exceptions are, ironically, the super-duper popular Animal Crossing: New Leaf, Pokémon X, and Pokémon Y. They use an exclusive form of saving that current flashcards do not support... yet.) Such a promising and delivering device spawned quite a few clones, the most significant of these being the MT-Card. While the Gateway 3DS requires the user to write the ROM image to a MicroSD card, effectively restricting someone to playing only one ROM image at a time, the MT-Card allows the user to simply copy the ROM images to the MicroSD card and switch between them at gameplay, delivering a feature (multi-image support) that other clones failed to deliver. The fact that Gateway 3DS seems to have purposefully inserted code that could brick the consoles of clone-users (though this could me a fluke) just motivated others to move to clones out of animosity against Gateway.

The reason why I brought this to light is that, according to ryuga93's (from GBATemp) translation of Sheau Feir Feir I Jia's (from Duo Wan)'s message, the true and honest reason why Gateway does not seem to be active is because Gateway had found an exploit that works with the 6.1 System Menu. [While, at the time of first writing this post, the latest System Menu version is 7.1.0-16, current 3DS Flashcards require a System Menu number between 4.1 and 4.5, something that is getting harder to find, since the latest compatible Nintendoo 3DS systems come from 2012. (Mine is at ) An exploit of the 6.1 System Menu, while more confusing (given how a gamer would have to guess which systems were made before September 2013), would never the less greatly increase the pool of compatible systems, especially those who just stopped updating their 3DS systems at the announcing, confirmation, or release of the Gateway 3DS.] The problem is that this new compatibility supposedly requires a new physical chip that current Gateway 3DS cards do not have, thus there is a need to deplete the current stock of old Gateway 3DS cards before the 2.0 Launcher.dat gets officially released.

Given that the 2.0 Launcher.dat would support both multiple ROM-images and NAND-based saving (thus allowing Gateway 3DS users to play Animal Crossing and Pokémon, there is a lot of hype regarding the release of the new Launcher.dat. If the new Launcher.dat requires a newer card, that would simply frustrate owners of current cards who need to spend an additional 80~ USD (about the same combined cost if the games was to buy the actual games themselves2) with the express purpose of playing those games.

I was going to post this yesterday, but I decided to let the conversation flow at the time. Surely, during my wait, hwh123 (from Duo Wan) and Commoner (from GBATemp) mentioned how Gateway 3DS bad-mouthed ('bad-fingered'?) clones, including MT-Card, which brings contradiction to Sheau Feir Feir I Jia's post, which also has the claim that the Gateway Team made the MT-Card, yet Sheau Feir Feir I Jia's earlier leak of the MT-Card made Gateway unable to release its stock. From what I could read of hwh123's comment (through both Google and Microsoft Translate), if Gateway needs to deplete its current stock of cards, then why does not Gateway simply drop the price of current cards, thus subverting both the frustrations of those who await the true-and-honest 2.0 Launcher.dat and those who would have purchased the essentially obsolete cards while, at the same time, 'defeating' the MT-Card (which is priced a little lower than the Gateway)? Also, would not delaying the announcement of the new card would risk a loss of potential customers due to those not knowing about the flashcard updating their 3DS's to an incompatible firmware? Commoner adds that the idea of a new chip that enables multi-boot being necessary contradicts the study of the MT-Card electronics, which do not require such a special chip. Besides, the MT-Card uses a hardware solution whereas Gateway is working on a software solution.

In all seriousness, I wrote this post with the purpose of organizing my findings on the matter. Currently, I want to purchase a Gateway 3DS, but, once again, I need to wait another day at least awaiting new discussion before I make a decision on the matter.

1 = 'or/and'

2 = ...assuming that you are buying only one version of Pokémon.