This $5 Card Plays EVERY DS Game Ever Made!

追加: 2026-05-20

[00:00:00]Drew Reviews This is probably the best $5 I've ever spent in this hobby. This card here plays your entire DS library.

[00:00:09]It works on every console Nintendo released from 2004 to 2014. Every original DS, every DS Lite, every 3DS.

[00:00:18]It gives you full DSi on a stock 3DS without any custom firmware. Some of the smartest minds in the DS hacking scene spent 4 years working on it. Then they gave it away for free. It's open source.

[00:00:32]Anyone can make it. So naturally someone did make this. Someone from Shenzhen.

[00:00:37]And they're selling it with shipping for under $5 and it comes from a place Let me Let me check my notes here. From a place called Chris Family Store on AliExpress. Uh all right. Oh, hi. It's your old buddy Zoo and today we're going to be answering one of two questions. Is this the best $5 you can spend in retro gaming this year?

[00:00:59]Or am I going to fry the 3DS that my wife got me for Valentine's Day over a decade ago? I don't know, but stay tuned and you're going to find out.

[00:01:09]This is what $4.46 and a week of patience will get you. A bubble mailer awkwardly tossed on your porch. A little box with your game card, some stickers, and a micro USB cable. We'll get back to this cable in a few minutes cuz it's more important than you might think. And here's the card itself. It's just a clone of the open source design from the LNH team. There's no model number.

[00:01:37]There's no QC sticker on the back from a factory in Guangdong. Just a micro USB port on the top, a micro SD card slot next to it, and a little notch where the game label would go on a real card. And here it is next to a real DS card.

[00:01:55]The shell on this is fine. It It's a hair thicker. The plastic's a hair shinier. The seam where the two halves meet has a little more lip than a real Nintendo card does. But otherwise, it's pretty close to a regular DS card outside of the transparent red. And that's pretty cool for $5. Keep in mind, $5. And if you grew up in the R4 era like I did, this is going to feel familiar. We're back to the days of generic flash cards that show up in a bubble mailer with no documentation, no support, and an SD card slot you're going to have to figure out yourself.

[00:02:35]The difference this time is that the design isn't proprietary. The team that built this published every schematic, every line of firmware, every CAD file for the shell, and they said, "Go for it." Which is why a $5 version of this can exist at all without somebody getting sued. Also, it comes with stickers. Now, I got this red one because it matches my red 3DS, but hell, let's throw a holographic raspberry on it.

[00:03:04]>> [music] >> Beautiful. Now, let's see if it boots.

[00:03:09]I'm starting with the good old-fashioned Nintendo DS here because the DS is easy mode for this card. It doesn't have any of the firmware drama you get with a DSi or a 3DS. You put a microSD card in, you put the cart in, you flip the switch, and it either works or it doesn't. In order to get this to work, your first step is going to be to format your microSD card to FAT32. Quick PSA, you really shouldn't use the Windows built-in formatter for this. Use the official SD card association tool.

[00:03:43]This is one of those things that sounds like superstition until your DS Pico won't boot and you got to spend 45 minutes in a bunch of Reddit threads.

[00:03:51]It's a $5 card, possibly 5 hours of drama if you don't follow the official instructions. I will put a link to the correct formatter in the description.

[00:04:00]Also, because this is FAT32, cards larger than 32 GB are going to require some finagling. It's doable. You need to download some other applications, but I wanted to do this fast. So, I found an old 16-gig card that'll hold a ton of DS games, and I called it a day. I've got links to everything in the description, but you're going to want to download the Pico Launcher folder. You're going to want to extract it, and then copy all that onto the SD card. Also, put on your legally acquired backups of carts you personally own.

[00:04:33]>> [cough and clears throat] >> Oh, and make sure they're NDS format.

[00:04:36]This doesn't like zip files. Put the SD card back in your cart, put the cart in your DS, you hit power, and there it is.

[00:04:45]DS Pico L N H team. Tap that. And in a couple seconds, Pico Launcher comes up.

[00:04:51]All your ROMs are in there, and you pick a game, and suddenly you have The World Ends With You on a real DS from a $5 card. Your loading times are normal, your saves work, everything works authentically as if you had the real card in front of you. And I'm tempted to tell you everything's fine, we're going to stop right here, except we're what, 3 4 minutes in, and I'd be lying to you because the DS, the regular DS, is the easy case. The actual story of this card is what happens when you put it in a 3DS. We'll get there, but first I got to talk to you about firmware, cuz if you don't know about how firmware works on here, your $5 DS Pico might not work at all. So, here's the potential trap.

[00:05:32]Every DS Pico that ships from AliExpress comes with the firmware pre-flashed, which sounds great, but the problem is twofold. First, the firmware version they pre-flash could be months out of date, which means microSD compatibility fixes and stability patches that exist today just aren't on your card.

[00:05:51]And second, and this is probably the most important one, there are two completely different firmware builds you might end up with. And they behave very differently depending on which console you're using. The two firmwares are called hybrid and WR I can't say that. We're going to call it WRFU. Both of these sound like they were named by the same person who named Chris family store, but whatever. Here's the difference. Hybrid firmware works on a DS, a DS Lite, and any DSi or 3DS that already has custom firmware installed.

[00:06:24]It does not work on a stock DSi or a stock 3DS. The WRFU firmware works on everything including stock consoles because it uses an exploit to get past the console's whitelist check. So, when your DS Piko shows up from AliExpress, you don't actually know what's on it.

[00:06:41]The only way to find out is to put it in a console and see what happens. If you boot up and you see a red screen that says WRFU tester or if your 3DS shows the card as Nintendo DS demonstration, congratulations. You have the swear word firmware on there and it's going to work on every console you own. If you were to see this show up as DS Piko L&H team, you have the hybrid firmware which means it'll work on your DS Lite, but it won't work on your stock 3DS. And if your console doesn't recognize the card at all, you got a black screen, an error, or nothing, either have no firmware flashed or a bad flash and we can fix that right now. Now listen, if your AliExpress card works out of the box and you don't want to mess around, that's fine. Just skip ahead. But if you do want the bleeding edge or if it doesn't load at all, you can reflash it. My DS Piko came with this QR code and it links to the user manual and the 1.0.1 swear word firmware. You just need to plug the included micro USB cable into the card, plug it into your PC. A folder should open up and you toss the DSP code.uf2 file on there. Once it copies over, the drive disappears and you're done. Put your SD card back in, put it into your 3DS or your whatever, it'll work. And one more thing, let's talk about box art. There's a scraper tool called Pico cover and it's super easy to use. It is all website based, you don't have to download executables or anything. You just load up the page, point it at your game directory and it downloads and places box art for you in all the appropriate folders. It happens in the blink of an eye, like less than three or four seconds for me. And then when you plug your DSP code into a device, you can see the art instead of blank cart images. Pretty cool and also pretty easy. So, here's the cool part for me. And like I said earlier, this is my Valentine's Day 3DS XL. My wife got it for me before we were married back when she was still trying to convince me that she liked me. And I will probably be buried with it. It is the handheld I've probably used more than any other handheld I own. And one of the small ongoing frustrations of using this thing for years is that the 3DS as a DS playing device has always been a little bit broken. Not because the hardware is bad, the hardware is great, but because every flash card you could buy for it until now, including the R4, ran in DS mode only. When you put a DS game into a 3DS, the 3DS can run it in two different modes. DS mode is the basic compatibility layer. It works for the original DS library, but DSi enhanced games lose their enhancements and DSi ware titles don't run at all. DSi mode is the full version, it does everything.

[00:09:27]And every flash card from the R4 era through last year ran your 3DS in DS mode only. So, if you wanted to play a DSi enhanced game like Pokémon Black 2 on a flash cart, you had to manually patch the ROM to get past the anti-piracy check. And if you wanted to play any DSiWare game like Shantae, Cave Story, you couldn't, period. They [clears throat] just didn't run. The DS Pico is the first flash card at any price point in over a decade that runs full DSi mode on a stock 3DS. So, for DSi games on a normal flash cart, they would freeze at the title screen. You wouldn't even get this far on Pokémon Black. The same games on the DS Pico, they work. There's no patch, there's no fuss, you're not Googling Pokémon Black 2 AP bypass cheat code at 11:30 at night. It just runs. And the same with every DSiWare title in the whole library. And there's been some genuinely great games in that library, by the way, that have been functionally locked behind hardware that no one could buy for the last 10 years. They're not locked anymore, they're unlocked for $5.

[00:10:32]This is pretty cool. A full DSi mode on a stock 3DS for $5 from a generic AliExpress listing is awesome if you're someone who hasn't already hacked your 3DS. So, enjoy it. Although, hacking 3DSs is super easy. Maybe I'll do a video on that. Now, it's time for the gauntlet. So, let's go around the desk and I'm going to show you what each one of these devices does, and then you can pick the one that matches whatever it is you want from a Nintendo DS in 2026.

[00:11:02]This is the OG, the DS fat with a DS Pico in the top slot. It's about 30, 35 bucks used on eBay if you shop around, sometimes less, sometimes more, plus $5 for the DS Pico, so that's 35, $40 all in. And what you get is the entire original Nintendo DS library running native on the console it was made for.

[00:11:26]The screens are 256 by 192. They're not bright, they're not high resolution, but they are the right pixel density for everything in this library. And the Game Boy Advance slot down here still works if you got a real Game Boy Advance cart kicking around. There's no DSi mode, there's no DSi wear, the fat predates all of that. But for the original DS library, it's probably the best authenticity on the desk at the lowest price on the desk. My Valentine's Day 3DS XL with the DS Pico. You used to be able to get these for cheaper, but nowadays they're going around like $125 for the console used, plus another $5 for the cart, so $130 total. But that is depending on you finding a decent eBay listing. This does everything the fat does, plus full DSi mode, which means Pokémon Black 2 unpatched, every DSi ware title, your Cave Stories, your Shantaes, all of it. And on top of that, you're holding a 3DS, so the entire 3DS library is also on play. One handheld, two and a half libraries, the DS, DSi, and 3DS, all for $130, maybe $150.

[00:12:40]The dollar per game math on this is kind of absurd.

[00:12:45]This is the Anbernic RG DS. It costs about 100 bucks. It has dual 4-in screens, both at a higher resolution than a real DS, running drastic on Android. There's no original cards, there's no flash cards. You drop ROMs on the SD card and you go. And here's what you get on this side of the desk that you don't get with the DS Pico setups.

[00:13:06]Save states, rewind, fast forward, the full quality of life suite of modern emulation. The D-pad can be a little janky on some devices. The emulation really starts to show strain in some busy scenes in certain games.

[00:13:21]But if you don't already own original Nintendo hardware and you want want one device that just does it for you right out of the box, the RGDS at 100 bucks gets you in the door. Plus, you can throw on some custom firmware and push the performance on here a little bit further.

[00:13:39]And then there's this, the AYN 4. $320 for the base model, but it has dual AMOLED screens. 6 in on top, almost 4 in on the bottom, and they look incredible.

[00:13:54]The blacks are real blacks, the colors are saturated in a way no DS screen has ever been. It's got a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 under the hood, which is wildly, wildly overkill for DS, but it lets you do something none of the other devices on my desk can do, which is run drastic at 6X internal resolution. The World Ends With You at 6X resolution, it looks like someone remastered it. Plus, you get all of the save state, all the quality of life stuff you get with the RGDS, plus enough power to emulate every system through PlayStation 2, 3DS, Switch, and X86 stuff now. It is a do-everything handheld that also happens to be the most expensive way to play DS on my desk, and the frankly the [clears throat] most beautiful way, if that's the thing you care about.

[00:14:42]So, that's the spread, about $40 for native on original hardware, 100 and change for native plus DSi mode, plus the 3DS library, 100 for emulation with save states with the RGDS, and then 300 plus for emulation at six times the resolution the game was designed to run at. Pick the one that matches what you actually want. But, if you've got any Nintendo hardware in a drawer somewhere, even a beat-to-crap DS fat, adding a $5 DS PICO-2 it is the easiest thing I can ever recommend on this channel. So, final answer time. If you already own a DS fat, a DS Lite, a DSi, or a 3DS, and a lot of you watching this do, that's why I'm making the video, just go buy the DS PICO today.

[00:15:30]Stop watching right now. The affiliate link's in the description. It's $5. $5 is the easiest spend in retro gaming this year, and it turns hardware you already paid for into a flashcard console. There is no version of this purchase where you regret it. And the prices fluctuate all the time. I can't guarantee $5 when you click. I paid four and a half, but by god, even if it gets jacked up by a couple bucks, it's still going to be cheap as hell for what you're getting. The one caveat I will repeat though, you are buying an unbranded clone from a seller you've never heard of. Quality will probably vary. Mine showed up working, and yours probably will too.

[00:16:10]And at five bucks, that's a bet you can take. If you want more quality control, there's probably vendors out there selling cleaner builds of the same open source design for more money, but it's really up to you. But but for five bucks, I'm willing to take the risk for five bucks. Well, Gary, the clock on the wall says it's time for what did we learn?

[00:16:31]And we learned is that sometimes the cheapest answer is the right answer. We learned that sometimes four years of volunteer work by an open source team beats 20 years of proprietary flashcard companies suing each other over our four clones. Sometimes the killer feature on a $5 card is something nobody could do at any price for better part of a decade. And sometimes your wife is going to start asking why there's so many handhelds on your desk, and you're going to have to explain that one of them only cost you $5, which probably not going to help your case.

[00:17:05]But again, it's just $5. Anyway, if this video helped you out, the affiliate link is in the description. And if you bought one through that link in the last couple weeks, thanks. You're the reason I made the video. We noticed a tremendous spike in sales. If you've got firmware questions, questions about the DS Pico, questions about how I'm so ruggedly handsome, drop them in the comments and I'll answer what I can. And remember to like and subscribe and hype and all that jazz. We are so so close to 100,000 subscribers. I really want to get there.

[00:17:34]I want that plaque and I'll do something goofy. So you can also comment weird goofy things I'll do once we get to 100,000. I trust you will be kind.

[00:17:45]Anyway, thanks for watching and we'll see you next time. Goodbye.

[00:17:53]>> [music]