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Nintendo DS Modded to Play GB and GBC Carts
Steve E. writes "Apparently someone has made the first hardware mod to the Nintendo DS. An entry over at the Nintendo DS Livejournal Community gives detailed instructions on how to modify a DS to play legacy cartridges." From the post: "1. Disassemble your Nintendo DS. This step is fairly self explanatory, if you can't figure out how to take your DS apart, you should stop here."
This seems a little suspect, in order for this to work Nintendo would have had to have included the GBC chipset on the DS, then disabled it for some reason. It can't be done via emulation because of voltage differences between GBA and GB carts.
Responding here, since I don't want to register to post at LiveJournal. For what it's worth, I have no idea at all about the DS or GBA. I don't own either and don't plan on it. IAAEE (Electrical. Engr.)
I agree that the post sounds suspicious, but I'd like to play devils advocate. The refutation sounds almost as suspicious as the orginal post.
> Well, grounding an already grounded wire and grounding the antenna isn't going to get you anywhere my friends.
That depends on the current involved and the capacity of the traces. The extra current drain might be required to handle running the cart at 5V instead of 3.3V.
I can't think of a good reason for grounding the antenna, but I can think of some plausible areas to investigate. Since the DS's processor contains the GBA's processor (stealing data from other posts). It's not uncommon for pins on these dual-mode processors to required grounding when it doesn't make sense to use the pin in that mode. You usually only find this information in the processor manual though, so it's unlikely he'd stumble acrossed it through expermental hacking.
> How does connecting 2 points on the CPU allow you to magically get a Z80 to work, as well as having the correct voltage of 5v on GB/GBC games and 3.3v on GBA games correctly detected?
This is an unusual way to change processor modes. The usual way is by grounding a pin or forcing it to Vcc. I would guess that one of the 2 pins is a mode pin and normally open or connected to Vcc, and the other pin is a Ground pin (possibly Vcc if the mode pin is open). By bridging the two, it's pulling the mode pin to the reference voltage of the other pin. Even if the pin was Vcc and is being pulled to ground, the current is general low enough that it would affect the battery life.
As I mentioned above, I'm not saying the hack is legit. I just think the counter arguments are as flimsy as the orginal arguments. Have fun hacking!
Following links fom within there, it appears that the DS's encryption has been hacked (Just today even), and working cart readers have been made. So progress is being made.