How long does it take for a properly working Nintendo DSi softmodded with Twilightmenu++/nds-bootstrap to load a game from the SD card? It seems to take nearly a minute to load a game for me. Everything works perfectly, it just seems to take a stupidly long time to get through the nds-bootstrap process (the first load of a game takes the longest, but subsequent loads of that game are only slightly faster).

Meanwhile I have a Nintendo DSlite with a flashcart that is wicked fast to start a game, but the power consumption of the thing in standby mode is out of control to the point that standby mode is essentially unuseable.

Is the trade-off really between stupidly long game loading times if using nds-bootstrap to start a game on the DSi but great power consumption, and wicked fast game loading but terrible battery life on a DSlite with a flashcart? Or is something wrong with my Twilightmenu++/NDS-bootstrap install?

  • Flicsmo@rammy.siteEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    I timed my DSi; it varies a lot by game but the largest I tried (Pokemon Black 2) loaded in around 25 seconds on the first run, then loads in under 10 seconds on subsequent runs.

    I recently started messing with my DSi again after a few years away from it, and you’re definitely not alone in being confused by it all - I really have no idea what exactly I did to it. To refresh everything I ended up just wiping the SD card, then putting Twilightmenu on it. I can still boot into unlaunch so I must have modified the firmware / internal storage before, but I don’t know if hiyaCFW is something that lives on there on the SD card.

    Speaking of which, that’s the same setup as my SD card, which is a 32gb Transcend. I can’t seem to find my SD card reader to double check but I’m pretty sure of using 32k cluster size.

    Might be worth mentioning, I have another DSi with a wildly different system boot time for no apparent reason. I set it up the exact same, but it takes 15+ seconds to boot vs the <5 of my main DSi, even when I swap SD cards. The only difference between them is that the one that takes a long time to boot is Japanese. Games take about the same time to boot so it doesn’t seem directly related to your issue but who knows.