i was recently informed by a rather experienced cart user that , in the case of the R4, they tend to loose their connectivity after a few months. i'm giving Serious weight to buying the Cyclo Evo now... but my question is now--- what is the life expectancy of the Cyclo... are these carts something that eventually gets thrown away because they die? It's a lot of money to have to throw out, and try to replace. I hope to get rid of a bunch of commercial games by being able to download. can you advise? Kindest jb ps- promise this will be the last question on this matter...
The Cyclops team have a strict faulty product procedure. If you have any problems let them know about it and if it's not a bug you can fix with option changes etc then they send you a new Evo directly and you send them your faulty one. So even if you got an Evo and it died you'd get a new one
Hello. I got the M3 DS Simply probably about 6 months ago and I have not had any problems with it. I love it and it has a very comparable price. I hope this helps
Actually, I've noticed that in *some* DS's the R4 doesn't work reliably from the get-go. It's easy enough to work around. It seems to be a minor design issue, and might have been sorted out with the re-design if they've used a thicker PCB or used thicker plastic for the case but I haven't seen one of the new ones yet to check that. The problem appears to be that the connectors in the cartridge slot don't reliably make contact wiht teh connectors on the cartridge. This can be fixed for testing purposes with a thin piece of card inserted between the label-side of the R4 and the slot, or more permanently with a thin piece of card or plastic (warranty card from Kingston Midro SD, overhead transparency film, etc) inserted inside the cartridge itself. This makes for a firmer connection between the connectors in the slot and the fingers on the PCB by pressing the PCB more tightly against the connectors in the slot. Open up the R4, place the board on the cardstock or plastic, carefully cut around it with a craft knife. Punch a hole in the appropriate location, and cut the top half inch or so of paper or plastic away from the Micro SD slot end of the paper or plastic. Re-assemble, and you should be fine. It may be a little harder to insert and remove after this, due to the outer case of the R4 binding on the slot, but electrically it should be much more reliable. I first encountered this with one DS that would take an R4 just fine, and another that I couldn't get the R4 to work in at all. Five minutes with a screwdriver and a craft knife was all it took to fix things permanently, and anyone I've helped with their R4 since then has ended up with this mod. I haven't had my hands on a cyclo cart, so I can't comment on the other features that might influence the decision, but the R4s with this mod appear to work more reliably with more DS's than stock R4's do and the price is far better than the EVO's. For something you can just set up for a cousin and forget about, that's not too expensive and will work reliably, the R4 with this mod gets my vote.
