Nintendo DS R4i, R4i Gold Cards R4DS (Revolution for DS), YushenDS Card (YDC) and M3DS Simply are essentially the same hardware product. The same method is used to distinguish between Chinese, English and Japanese (and German for the YDC) versions of the cards. The firmware for the various brand and language versions can be readily patched to work on other language or brand versions of the hardware.
The original R4 memory card was replaced in late 2007 by the "R4 version 2" or "R4v2". This new version removed the need for a spring mechanism to insert a Micro-SD card. Instead, it simply had a slot in the back where a user could manually slot a Micro-SD card in. This eliminated the problems of the original R4 Revolution DS Card where the spring mechanism reportedly malfunctioned after prolonged use.
Unlike newer cards, the R4 cannot read SDHC (Secure Digital High Capacity) cards due to hardware limitations, although certain clones add this functionality. There exist several clones of the R4 card that are capable of using SDHC cards, but some studies have suggested that certain types of these cards have high failure rates. One clone, named the "R4 SDHC", is reported to be reliable. R4DS is now known to be outdated, as many other flashcarts are known to be better and cheaper (Acekard 2, M3 Real Supercard One, and Edge), and a genuine R4DS is hard to find.
The R4i and R4i Gold have been tested and reported to work with the Nintendo DSi XL console released in March 2010.
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