R4i Gold Kernel & R4i Gold 3DS firmware

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
(Free-Press-Release.com) August 26, 2011 -- The native firmware for the R4i Gold from www.r4ids.cn is the R4i Gold Kernel, the tested version was 1.51. This is a modified version of Moonshell, which is the standard home media viewer for the DS series. The version modified here is 2.02. Moonshell is naturally capable of playing various audio formats, viewing various image formats, and even playing videos converted into a specific format (DPG). It's not uncommon for a flash cart team to modify Moonshell to fit in with their cart, so it'll be interesting to see what this team did.

The first visible change is that the R4i Gold Kernel boots into a DSi stylized main menu. From left to right, the options are Game, Audio, Video, NotePad, Picture, and File Browser. To further add to the feel of the DSi's menu, there are 12 empty icons to the right of the main ones. The R4i Gold team informs me that you will be able to add your own icons in a later version of the kernel to boot directly to your favorite games.

The Game option currently launches Wood at the base menu, though this may change in a later version.
The Audio option launches moonshell's file browser, displaying all compatible audio files on your MicroSD.
The Video option launches moonshell's file browser, displaying all compatible video files on your MicroSD.
The Notepad option launches moonshell's file browser, displaying all compatible text files found on your MicroSD.

The Picture option launches moonshell's file browser, displaying all compatible image types found on your MicroSD.
The File Browser option launches moonshell's file browser at the root of your MicroSD.

While automatically viewing all the files of a specific category located on your MicroSD seems like a useful feature at first, many homebrew games and programs keep their resources in various folders as plain files. This means that most people will open up one of the options only to be greeted with a huge list of files that are useless on their own, with the files they actually want interspersed. Another issue is that these lists will contain files that cannot actually be played, such as some tracker formats. Taking these drawbacks into consideration most people will end up using the File Browser option so they can choose their media manually by browsing folders. Upon using the file browser it appears that many options from Moonshell have been removed or locked, and any attempt to run an NDS file (retail game or homebrew) simply launches Wood (at it's default screen).


While the R4i Gold site has information and download links for various themes/skins, these are for the older version of the kernel. The current version uses a different type of skin (SKN file), and the team tells me they do plan to release a tool for it.

The native firmware consists of one file and a system folder. The file is _DS_MENU.DAT, and the folder is _SYSTEM_. The _DS_MENU.DAT file is what the R4i Gold cart attempts to boot off of. In the Wood R4i Gold distributions this is replaced with a copy of the WOODR4.NDS file, so if you're upgrading just the Wood R4 firmware and want to keep the R4i Gold Kernel as default, do not replace the _DS_MENU.DAT file with the one that comes with Wood (otherwise your R4i Gold will boot straight into Wood every time).

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