R4i Revolution Upgraded for Nintendo DSi – Review

We ordered the R4i Adapter from Memorybits complete with 2Gb micro SD card at a cost of £27.95.

For the avoidance of doubt, this was not a review copy, but was bought and paid for by ourselves; however, we now have an exclusive 20% discount code ‘PR20′ which you can use at Memorybits or their sister Zoombits stores in France, Germany or the US.

The packaging was full retail box packaging (no shrinkwrap) rather than OEM. In common with many suppliers, Memorybits supplied the micro SD card separately to the R4i adapter packaging and this once again was in full retail but blister packaging probably due to the very small size of these flash cards.

The micro SD card was Kingston branded which is a respected brand and was supplied pre-formatted straight out of the package. You must have a micro SD card for the R4i Revolution to be of any use to you.

We ordered the R4i Revolution, but what we actually received was the R4i Revolution Upgraded (still for the DS, DSL & DSi). I have tried to dig arount and identify whst Úpgraded’means in this context, but haven’t found any differences to actually report. The R4i came in a distinctive red box (virtually identical to the original R4 packaging) and contained :

• R4i Adapter in a protective game case
• Thumbdrive USB Micro SD caed reader
• Wrist-strap … could be used with any of games case, thumbdrive adapter or even the DSi itself

I already had an R4 Revolution and a Micro SD card from the original DS that this DSi (and R4i) was replacing, and it was a simple matter of removing the old R4 operating system and downloading the new R4i software (Memorybits pointed me to and hosted the download) onto the original SD card leaving the original content intact.

The firmware installation was an easy matter of downloading a zip file and extracting it. Once I had extracted the zip file to my PC, it was a very simple job to drag and drop two folders and a file to the root folder of the micro SD card.

If you do want to add and play backup versions of your games, then you will need to have a look around for the NDS Roms; we will not help you here as that could be considered a copyright theft.

However, what matters is that when we plugged everything together and had the R4i in our DSi (in total 5 minutes effort), everything worked as well from the R4i as they did from the original cartridge, except that the original cartridges are now in their box safely on a shelf where they will not be lost or damaged.

Very impressed … So far a 10/10 for me with using the R4i as supplied by Memorybits. If you now want to buy, then don’t forget that we now have an exclusive 10% discount code ‘PR10′ which you can use at Memorybits or any of their sister Zoombits stores in France, Germany or the US.