MoonShell & Nintendo DS Videos

Watch Videos on Your Nintendo DS

Note: To play videos on your DS/DS Lite you’ll need a flash cart e.g. Supercard or M3.

One of the main reason I purchased a Supercard for my Nintendo DS is that I wanted to be able to watch movies on the train/bus etc on my DS. The orginal software I tried was from www.movieadvance.com. After encoding a few TV shows and movies and then opening them with the GBA application on my DS I was really disapointed the video quality was far from great and the audio was pretty bad. This may well have been down to the encoding software which frequently locked up.

Putting Moonshell on your Nintendo DS

I thought as this movie playing software was originally made for GBA that I would look for one created specifically for the Nintendo DS, unfortunatly there wasn’t much information around (in english) but after googling various terms I came across a forum post that was discussing using the video format DPG instead of the GBM and GBA files used by the Movie Advance software. To playback and to encode to DPG you need to Download Moonshell plus the Moon Shell Windows Tools.

All the required files can be downloaded from the official Moonshell website, or from the links below.

* Latest Version of MoonShell including the DPG Tools (mirror)

Once you’ve downloaded MoonShell onto your Windows PC you’ll need to extract the Zip file and run “setup.exe” this will open the setup program, from here you need to choose your output directory where the NDS files will be output to. Once it’s been run you should have three files created. These files are:

* _BOOT_MP.nds
* _BOOT_MP_SC.nds
* _BOOT_MP_SmallM3SD.nds

I believe that the three different NDS files are for different hardware, e.g. Supercard or M3 SD Card. I have a Supercard 2 (SD) and _BOOT_MP_SC.nds is the only one that works on my card.

So copy the relevant NDS file to your flash card and insert everyting into you Nintendo DS and turn it on, now run the file you copied.

You should see some information on the top screen scroll down before a Graphical Interface appears on the top and bottom screens. If this has worked then you have got Moonshell working fine.
MoonShell Running on Nintendo DS

Converting video to DPG

OK so now you need to extract the MoonShell Win Tools archive. This will contain an executable called dpgenc.exe this is the application that encodes videos to the DPG format. Run this application and then set the language to the relevant one using the drop down box. Now choose you video and click Start and choose the output location and the encoding should start. Video encoding time varies depending on the video and your PCs processer. On my 2400XP encoding is roughly half the time of the full video. Once converted copy the video to your DS flash card restart your DS and load Moonshell. Now navigate to the DPG video file on the top screen of your DS and press A.

Moonshell Playing an Episode of the Simpsons