Alpha Blogs

Yes I made this video

What's M3 Kaura? Well it's the new firmware for the M3i Zero and M3 Real flashcarts! While it's not officially a firmware, it sure does act like one! Kaura is really a boot menu update overhaul. The boot menu is (or was) that screen you saw when launching a new update of Sakura for the first time, you know? Where you chose between Sakura and Touchpod? I don't blame you for having trouble remembering it, the thing was useless. Note the was! Now this new boot menu, Kaura, is very much more memorable. It's nothing too special. I mean it's it's no AKAIO killer, but it sure is handy. Keep reading to get the full hands on!

Summary of this article: Kaura has quite a few flaws, but it's pretty cool. It doesn't stick out from Sakura, it's no SuperCard DS2 or Cyclo, but it's handy. It's what you might get if you mixed Touchpod and Sakura. You get the functionality, and somewhat more organized feel of touchpod. Then you get the speed, comfort, and prettyness (real word?) of Sakura. Kaura is skinnable much like Sakura, it has one page scrolling (meaning no have to go through your rom list page by page like in touchpod), but it's not exact scrolling like in Sakura (it goes through each file one at a time, but it's really fast if you want it to go that fast). It has a recently used list (that holds up to 5 recently run files, homebrew, roms, etc.), a brightness changing button (doesn't work on DSi's, but you can just hold select and use the volume button at any time for that), 5 different default languages (more can be added by anyone), and the option to always boot to Kaura. On top of all this, Kaura has a interface based off the original DS and DS Lite firmware (points to video above)! It looks pretty cool and nostalgic (especially if you have a DSi now and no DSLite). Only downside for skinning is that the buttons are stuck there (obviously, I don't think there's any flashcart with skinning that advanced). The process of skinning is pretty simple...to an extent, it's a mix between touchpod and sakura. Part of it is just replacing images, and part of it is making a .skn file (the same file Sakura uses). However, because of this .skn file, we aren't able to skin as much as we could. We know how to make the .skn files, we just don't know what all images we need and what they need to be named. However, the m3 team should give us the required image names, sizes, etc. soon once Kaura is out of beta.


Quick display of Kaura's functions (click the image to see larger version)

The recently use list is cool because it's right where the NDS Game launch is on the DS Lite menu (meaning if you have a good enough skin you could easily fool your friends into thinking you hacked your DS). You also get a pretty cool interface for skin selection, it's similar to the itouchds's ifav system. You have one window with a table of icons, each representing a skin. Also, when you choose your options for your games you get a couple new features. To start you can backup your currently loaded real time save file (is0) to the two backup files without having to goto the RTS menu (is1 and is2 files). Further more when choosing cheats you get the full cheat description (unlike Sakura). Other than those two small tidbits everything else is pretty much the same. You may have thought by now "Well what are they going to use the old GBA launching box for (the box under pictochat and ds download play)?" well I'll tell you! It's similar to the itouchds's ifav function. You browse through your files and press y and then a game will be set to that box until you decide to replace it with something else! It's pretty handy if want quick access to a homebrew or game you're currently playing.

Kaura also has little things that you may not notice for awhile but still count. Like if you press X on a homebrew app in Sakura it'll just freeze. If you do it in Kaura it'll detect that it's homebrew and directly launch it. You also have a analog and digital clock at the top as well as a timer. Oh and one of my favorite new features is if you boot Sakura via Kaura and have problems with disk check you can press A+B+L+R to bypass disk check and turn it off.

Next onto some of Kaura's flaws. It's a well known fact that beta means there will be bugs, so it's to be expected that it will have some problems (so be nice when commenting, no outright hate comments like "LOLOLOLOL that sux, it haz so maney bugs lololololololol"). First off Kaura will corrupt some game's saves (it will attempt to make a new save, and say it fails causing your save to go capooey!), so make sure you backup all your saves before running anything in it. Secondly it has HORRIBLE (not the caps and bold) homebrew support. I have yet to successfully play one homebrew game via Kaura. I have heard some people have gotten some homebrew to work but I either get an error message from the homebrew or just a black screen. My theory is that the M3 Team has yet to include auto DLDI functions in Kaura (as seen in the video at the top, when running Still Alive DS it asks to DLDI patch it). Thirdly (I don't usually get to a thirdly, normally I stop at secondly ) Kaura has some problems with saving settings, such as when you set the brightness level to 3 it'll save it as 4 (N/A for DSi) and sometimes it just fails to save game options (RTS, SR, Cheats, etc.). The game options saving can luckily be bypassed by just setting the options in Sakura. Finally if you choose the Russian language you'll get an error and have to re copy over the config file (this has been fixed by some unofficial edits however).

Finally, I'm going to mention some of Kaura's unofficial edits (I know, this only just came out half a month ago and it's already getting some edits). First we have the fixed Russian language bug that'd corrupt your config file that also adds a portroguese language. Then we have dsrules's edit that replaces touchpod completely with itouchds. So whenever your push the touchpod button it would launch itouchds! Finally, something that just came out recently, the quint-boot. Some of you who have the M3 Real or M3i Zero are familiar with iSakuReal which is a tri-boot that has 3 firmwares (Sakura 1.12+, which is outdated, Touchpod, and itouchds). Not many people use it because you can only use it with a really old version of Sakura to be able to perform the "exploit" that allows this tri-boot to work. So now what dsrules did was basically take isakureal and embed it within the touchpod option. So you still have the regular new Sakura on the left, but on the right you have the old sakura that will also be able to boot touchpod and itouchds. It's a pretty good idea, and it works great! For those of you still lost here's a quick diagram of how it works:

Do you like my awesome paint skillz?

So all in all I'd have to say I like this firmware. It may not bring anything too terribly new to the table and it may have quite a bit of bugs, but it's a breath of fresh air compared to using the same old firmwares for the last year and a half! I hope to see m3 kaura grow into an even better firmware than it already is, just like Sakura!