I am currently in the midst of an awesome toys storm! This week has seen the arrival of a Macbook, Crumpler Backpack and I just picked up my M3 DS Simply from the post office. With a Numark AVM02 arriving tomorrow, I’m worried that I’ll become paralysed by the sheer weight of cool techy stuff. Hence: Pocket Review!

Peter put the DS Lite and DS-Xtreme in his Digital Musician Holiday Wish List. I picked up a DS a couple of weeks ago, but thought the DS-Xtreme looked a little pricey and wanted something which would use SD or MicroSD media, as they’re the formats used by my still camera and phone.

Et volia. The Nintendo DS M3 Simply. A choice echoed by a comment made on CDM 3 days ago. AU$61 (US$48) delivered from Bamboo Gaming, it arrived in 9 days, and includes a “thumbdrive” form factor MicroSD reader, driver CD, and a cute little holder to attach to your keyring or mobile phone lanyard or nose ring or whatever it is the cool kids are doing on my lawn.

That’s all interesting, but there are loads of reviews online which could tell you what you’ll get in the box if you buy one of these things. What they don’t really get across is how simple this thing is. Following these instructions it took me less than ten minutes to go from this:

Before M3 DS Simply

To this! Nitrotracker. DSMidiWifi baybee!

M3_simply_2

Modding my XBox to run Media Center was complicated enough that I enlisted another geek to do it for me. Getting homebrew running on the DS took less time than copying and resizing the above images.

Nintendo DS M3 Simply: Recommended! [tags]nintendo, DS, homebrew, trackers, gaming, midi, hacks, hardware, mobile, software, wireless[/tags]

Updated: I had to patch NitroTracker with DLDI for R4DS using the instructions here to get NitroTracker accessing the filesystem and saving correctly.