Nintendo v.s Flashcard ~ Secret in Made in Ore
The story can be traced back to GBA time. Nintendo intended to imbed Flash 2Mbit savedata in its game as the resistance to flashcard. Things became more well-known in public when the flashcard users saw the embarrassing word Thank you for Playing in Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles. From that day, more and more encrypted codes were added in the game, bringingҠabout game system halted, endless loop or shutdown during the gameplay with flashcard.The latest trick played by Nintendo is Mario & Luigi RPG 3, a quitely counterattack nearly to reach the goal. And now how about this time? From the Touch-DS interview of Satoru Iwata, he refered to a special chip called NAND Flash as data storage in Made in Ore in particular, which contains high density storage unit and very fast erase-rewrite speed. This special form of Flash memory does perfect match with the game made up of a lot of minigames, in which data frequently exchanges. TheҠsudden shift in hardware storage is responsible for the save error and even programme failure on majority of flashcards.
Compare with encrypted codes, NAND Flash issue would be more complicated since it changes the anti-flashcard method by altering hardware structure. Checking the ROM info, we find that there is a huge difference between File size(256Mbit)Ҡ and real ROM size(1024Mbit), which indicates the savefile of Made in Ore can reach to 768Mbit. Those rooms are apparently used for save your own mini games. Another possibility is that 256Mbit is perhaps a bad dump, the actual size of this game should be 1GB.
Well, no matter how the crackdown and rebellion happen, NAND Flash might be a new way for Nintendo to conquer its enermy. Facing the tidal wave of more DS games with new hardware system equipped, whither the flashcards?