NDS:Region Information

Good news first: The DS is fully region free, and in fact is almost the same world wide - except in China and Korea, where Japanese and Italian are respectively replaced with those languages.

But curiously, Chinese software is artificially not compatible with foreign DSes; and even stranger is the fact this misfeature can be bypassed by merely changing the region code at address 0x1D in the header to 00 (international) - or by running the unmodified game on an unmodified DSi or 3DS.

Those consoles do however have region lock for software developed for them, resulting in DSi-enhanced titles being region locked on a DSi or newer but not on a DS/Lite. To add to the confusion, the non-Japanese versions of mainline DSi Pokemon games (perhaps the most famous DSi-enhanced titles) have most regions except Japan enabled in their header. Europe and Australia are also separate regions despite most titles supporting both or none of the two.

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  DS-only title (supported on DSi/3DS by whitelisting or new signed header) - "Nintendo DS" logos, usually grey shell, NTR]]

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  Dual mode title - "Nintendo DS" logos, usually grey shell, TWL-????-???

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  DSi-only title (does nothing useful on DS/Lite) - "Nintendo DSi" logos, white shell, TWL-????-???