While roaming in Japan, I stumbled across a little gem of a device: the R4DS. This little baby slips into a Nintendo DS handheld console and lets you play downloaded games loaded onto a microSD card. After downloading a few hundred NDS games, selecting a few, and copying them onto the card, I have to say that it's even nicer than buying the games, since you can just load them up and not carry a pocket of DS game cartridges with you.

The R4DS should sell for <$30 on most websites, comes with a microSD card adapter for your PC, but does not include the memory card itself. I recommend any of the 1GB or 2GB cards, since most NDS games vary from 32 to 128 mb.

Ever since then, I've been looking for a similar solution for playing my GBA games on my NDS, but with no luck. There seems to be no easy way to play GB/GBC/GBA games. I've bought 3 adapters which all seem to suck equally: EZFlash-V was the most promissing, but the menu software sucked and it was difficult to even get it to play NDS games. The M3 Lite was also promising, since it was the only one to really be mentioned as working in combination with the R4DS, but it was cumbersome and awkward and just plain strange.

I should note that if you can't get an R4DS, the M3 Simply is identical. In fact, you can even use the firmware from the other, and switch back and forth to find which set of software you prefer.