Nintendo’s DS systems is one the most successful handheld gaming systems in history. Unfortunately all you can do with it is play games. Well that’s what you bought it for isn’t it? But wouldn’t it be great if you could use your DS like a portable media centre? Wouldn’t it be good to listen to your mp3s, watch videos and see your holiday photos on it?

Guess what. You can. All you need is a little device called the R4DS (or R4 Revolution if you prefer). The R4 is a bit of a Revolution for DS as it happens. It could become an essential component for every DS owner to enhance their experience, or it could turn the system into a software pirate’s dream.

The R4DS works as an adaptor for your DS to transfer data with a flash SD card, the type you might use in a digital camera or mobile phone. First you need to put your applications and files on your SD card from your computer. Following that, simply plug the R4DS into your Nintendo DS, then your SD card into the R4DS. Then you can use whatever files and applications are stored on the SD card in your DS (honestly, I’m not trying confuse you with all these “SD”s and “DS”s.

The applications can be downloaded from the Internet from specialist websites. The types of application you can expect range from music players, image viewers and calculators to card games and homemade platform games.

On top of this, using the R4DS, you can back-up all your current DS games onto an SD card. This is a Godsend if you have messy children that don’t put their games away and a 3 month old puppy eager to tear apart anything it can get its teeth on. Since I had a back-up of Pokemon Diamond there were no tears when our dog got a little over excited with the copy we’d bought just a week before. Thank you R4.

Not only that, you can easily back-up all your games onto a single SD card. That means you don’t need to lug your entire games collection around with you. In fact you never need to unplug the R4DS as it can store all your games in it. That means no more hunting around for lost DS cartridges. It makes the Nintendo DS an all-in-one portable gaming and media station, for less than the price of a single game.

However, all is not well in R4DS-land. There is a fairly significant threat that could harm the video gaming industry and it’s consumers on two fronts. That is piracy.

The R4DS is not illegal (you can buy them from Amazon), but Nintendo wish it was. Video game pirates use the R4DS to play games they do not own legally. Owners of the R4DS are urged not to take advantage of this and Nintendo are fighting to stop the sale of the product. The long-term effects of piracy are a weaker gaming industry and therefore fewer games and games of a lower quality.

Ironically, the threat of piracy also threatens the R4DS itself. There are many online stores selling imitations of the R4 Revolution. There are plenty of Internet forum reports of people plugging in their brand new R4DS only to find they can never turn their DS on again. But after closer inspection, they realise it not a true R4DS but a very similar clone.

It looks like the R4DS will give a large proportion of Nintendo DS owners a new and exciting way to utilise their portable gaming console. It also looks like Nintendo have quite a battle to stop the sale of the R4DS which will undoubtedly lead to in an increase in piracy. The fairest situation it seems would be for Nintendo to close down the pirate websites and allow the ethical use of the R4DS to continue.

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