MoonShell. What is it? Well, it's a few different things. In short, it's a multi-media player for the Nintendo DS. And a very good one, too. It works on most Slot-1 flash cards, and there are a few versions of it. The most popular one, though, seems to be version 1.71, which is what we use.
So what all can this app do? It can play a variety of audio, it can play videos, read text files, and view images. We'll cover each of these things seperately. For now, let's talk about the difficulty of it's use. Or should I say lack of difficulty. It's very simple to use. Put it on your card, boot it up, and select the file you want to read, listen to, or watch. The top screen shows the files, slected by highlighting with the D-Pad and pressing the A button. The touch screen displays various information (at certain points, which we'll cover below). It also has a guide showing you the controls, which makes it even simpler and user friendly.
Now let's move on to it's functions. We'll start with the one I rarely use. The text reader. All you do is highlight the text file you want to read, and press A, and it shows on the bottom screen. You can scroll up and down with the D-Pad, and pressing left or right will act as a Page Up and Page Down buttons on a keyboard. It only supports .txt files, however, at least as far as we know. We've never tried any other types, but we've both been told that they are the only kinds that work. That pretty much sums up this function. After all, it's just a text reader. What more do you expect?
Now for the video player, which honestly has mixed opinions between the Portable Crew. Portable C has used it alot, and has never had a complaint, while I have only tested it to make sure it worked as I had heard. My complaint is that the size of the video is too small. About half the size of the screen. However, I will tell you that it is very clear, provided the video itself was clear before converting. She doesn't seem to have a problem with the screen size. The audio on the video is great. If you watch a video that has subtitles, you won't be able to read them. You'll have to convert the video you wish to put on the card into a DPG file, then put it on your card. The top screen plays the video and the bottom shows info and the time bar, which can be controlled using the stylus.
The audio player is the one I often use. It is very well made. The top screen shows the list of files, the bottom shows info about the file (artist, album, stuff like that.), the time bar, which is used just like the video player. However, unlike the video player, this function is more forgiving with the types of files you can use. You can play any of the following: MP3 / OGG / MOD / SPC / MDX (no PCM) / GBS / HES / NSF / XM / MIDI / WMA / low bit rate AAC audio. You can adjust the volume up to 4x the DS's normal volume. You can also set it to stop after the track is done, to move on to the next file, to plays files randomly, or to repeat one file.
Now, for the worst part about this app. The image viewer. It is horrible. You can view any of the following: non-progressive JPEG / BMP / GIF / PNG. But even so, some of those will still give you errors, and it shows the image at the same size as it would on a computer, meaning you'll have to scale it down alot just to view the entire image. However, doing so, it will be just as clear as normal sized, including for zooming, and it seems to fix pixelation fairly well. But that was not enough to save it, in my opinion. There are much better apps for viewing images.
MoonShell is a good app, at least to us. We use it alot on the go. It's free, easy to find, easier to use, and overall is just a well made program. If they took out the image viewer, it would be perfect. If you use Slot-1 flash cards, we recomend using this app, because it is one of the best out there, and is actually very popular.
Rating
Portable D: 2/10 (image viewer) 9/10 (audio player) 7/10 (video player) 10/10 (text reader, after all, that's all it does and it does it well)
Portable C: 1/10 (image viewer) 10/10 (audio player) 10/10 (video player) 10/10 (text reader)
