[hibikir]

It's not as if it's a defense against emulating the consoles on a PC: That's not really a problem worth investing time into. However, those tricks also work against bootleg hardware, which can be seen as emulation. It even works against counterfeit cartridges, in the case of the save game trick.

DS games also come with copy protection to stop people from running it in cartridges that run gmaes off of images, like the R4. In that case, the product the pirates offered was actually better than buying an original cartridge: I could buy 20 games and carry a case of games, or keep them al in a single micro SSD card, and switch games at will from the boot menu.