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Modded DS Adds Hard Drive For Some Reason
An anonymous reader writes "The legendary Natrium42 has been hard at work on making an IDE connection for the DS. He now has a working 40GB hard drive ready for his DS to utilize, now he says perhaps he could listen to music or watch full length rips of his DVDs."
This is SLASHDOT! Why does someone need a reason other than "why not" to mod something? I can see plenty of uses for this(Homebrew storage, movies, music, backups of games...).
Yay, I have a sig.
=the newest innovation in porn.
Monstar L
Dude, if you can't solder using just the flux that's inside the solder wire, you should do a quick Soldering-101 course before you try hacking something...
If you didn't know either, check wikipedia
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
...in those cases when you do need extra flux, a true hacker *makes* his own flux: dissolve rosin in alcohol. But that's only needed where the parts to be soldered are corroded in some way, which is not the case in TFA, soldering recently peeled wire to gold plated pins.
They need to get it done with a flash drive. More compact and you won't look like a huge loser lugging around a HDD.
I wonder how this would impact the battery life of the DS.
Sure, ok, he did it because he could. Congrats. But really. Why not use a micro drive instead or a very high capacity flash card? It would at least be portable.
He's legendary.
This would look less lame if you wound define the acronym even once.
Dragon Stone? Door Stop? Denver Sexworker? Drastic Step? Dirty Shit? Diligent Securitymodule? Dying Suitor? Dog Spit? Drunken Sailor? Dastardly Scruples? Dead Sloth? Dominant Submissive? Danish Singer? Dual Singleton? DeathSword? Dread Symphony? Dynamite Saw? Diamond Sewer? Deloused Sundancer? Defluxedmagnetonumetric Sensor?
Its a nice hack indeed, to add IDE to a DS, but if you invest in an Open Game Console in the first place, you'll find its not so hard to do yourself ..
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
A hack like this is only truly useful if you can watch two different movies on the two screens at the same time...
This guy's the limit!
Hmm, I guess since this is using the exact pin-layout of a CF flash card this implies high compatibility (i.e., will work with GBAMP NDS Firmware Hack and the GBAMP FAT driver. I was wondering which DS flash card to buy, and I was eying the M3 lite for DS, but given all the compatibility problems, I'm leaning towards a CF solution, now, even though this sticks out of my Nintendo DS lite as much as a mile..
Or can anybody recommend something else that's compatible with homebrew (M3 CF (or SD) lite, or one of the Supercards)
Georg
It's already been done with flash drives. From the image "What you see is what you need", bottom right is a CompactFlash card, and bottom center is a CF to DS SLOT-2 adapter.
Now most PC hard drives communicate with the PC using a wire protocol known as parallel ATA, on which CF is based. One could run a ribbon cable out of the CF adapter, run it through some level shifters (DS is 3.3 V while hard drives are 5.0 V), and run it into the 40-pin data port of a hard drive.
But does it run homebrew?
Georg
The M3 is more expensive than the similar GBA Movie Player v2, and its major advantage over the GBAMP is that the M3 also runs all Game Boy Advance homebrew. (The GBAMP runs only those programs that are designed to be sent over a link cable and run from RAM.) Are you interested only in DS homebrew or in both?
I bet the NetBSD guys put him up to this.
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
I'd prefer to use DSLinux to get best of both worlds.. the great games of the Nintendo DS, and the flexibility of Linux (for which, to be honest, there are not as many great games as for the DS).
Georg
Were you afraid of clogging up teh tubes with putting "Nintendo" in the snippet? Isn't an editor's job trying to figure out how to explain something in a compact form to people? YOU FAILED DORKASS
Say I live in Fort Wayne, Indiana, USA, and I have eleven $20 notes in my hand. What store can I walk into and buy a GP2X system? Wal-Mart and Best Buy don't seem to carry them. Neither does EBGames, which tends to carry a larger selection of video game hardware. The advantages of hacking a DS ($200 for everything you see here) are 1. the DS's selection of commercial games if you get tired of homebrew, and 2. network effects such that people looking for a multiplayer match are more likely to randomly encounter another DS owner in the mall than a GP2X owner.
Another article that mentions Nintendo products might have angered Sony fanboys who complain about the excess of positive coverage that Zonk has been giving to Nintendo.
The Nintendo DS community is a loud and wonderful beast. In the last few months... We've had DSDoom, DSLinux and Dev-Scene. natrium42 is a brillant developer and this is an interesting piece of hack but.. wouldn't be have been a better idea to post the bigger picture (for some reason all my submittions keep getting denied.)
Now where have I heard that before?
I don't know why anyone would want to watch a movie on a DS. The screen is way too small and doesn't support enough colors. It would end up looking like crap and, dispite the coolness of getting to say "I can watch movies on my ds", it wouldn't be worth it.
Here's a mirror just in case the link gets Slashdotted.
Take-off every
Hi, we're from the [RIAA | MPAA | etc] and we have a court order which allows our expert look at your NintendoDS to see if it contains anything we can sue you for.
We all know where this is going. I'm looking forward!
The above is most likely humour. Slashdot foot icon goes here.
TuxRacer? fortune?
EOM
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If you didn't know either, check Wikipedia.
For what it's worth, my friend makes use of a toaster oven in his soldering experiments, and it's quite easy to do it wrong - he toasted an iPaq at least once doing that.
It's only an insult if it's not true.
oh, i dunno
the GP2X has, very definitely and in flying colors, one thing the DS doesn't have: audience-participation in the development process. the open source games realm is, truly, blossoming.. there have lately been quite a few interesting games popping up on the strictly-linux-only scene, not to mention a rather large porting effort is well under way and doesn't seem to be losing any kind of steam
i honestly can think of one DS game i 'must have' in my kit (elektroplankton), whereas on the gp2x, i've got, literally, 20gigs worth of SD cards, crammed to the gills with stuff
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
"For some reason"? It even says in the summary that the mod creator planned to use it for music and movies. The reasdons for adding an IDE drive are numerous and obvious, so I consider this wording to be a rather poor choice (especially for Slashdot, whose readership generally understands what disk storage is).
Imagine fitting 40 gbs of homebrew and roms on your DS with this hard drive, it would be awesome, but lets be fair this will never catch on unless its shrunk down to miniscule size and even then with news from the Nintendo DS Emulation scene of a new flash cart the same size as a normal game cart who really needs it.
"Wow, this guy must have really big pockets."
You live and learn. At least, you live.
Some of us, however, like to play popular, modern games on our consoles.
A similar 4GB Hard Drive that sticks on the underside of a Sony PSP is available. It has a CF connector inside of it too. I'm not sure what the maximum limit for the size of a Memory Stick is. However, I'm sure many people would like to know. At any rate, there are 60GB 1.8" hard drives which when coupled with the adaptor would make for a somewhat portable PSP or Nintendo DS.
I suppose one could, with a IDE to SATA bridge board and a few other parts, add an eSATA port to a PSP or a Nintendo DS. I suppose then, with a four drive eSATA rack, one could add up to 2TB of storage. Why 2TB? because 2TB is the largest size that FAT32 can be formatted. I'm not sure at all what one would do with a 2TB Nintendo DS, but that shouldn't stop anybody. Perhaps one could run a large database off of a Nintendo DS. Speed and stability would be a problem though.
I wonder though, does either the Sony PSP or the Nintendo DS have a Memory Management Unit (MMU) with their processor? If they do not, it would be impossible to use a swap file. Then again, Motorola made a separate MMU, the 68851, for processors about 15 years ago. I suppose one could try to add an MMU to a PSP or NDS too, but that would be really demented.
Impersonating Tycho from Penny Arcade since before there was a PA.
I considered the GP2X instead of the DS, but the DS has a stylus. So for $130 + $60 in accessories to enable homebrew, the DS ends up costing the same price as the GP2X. Plus the DS has 512x384 pixels of screen real estate vs 320x240, and built-in Wii-Fi. Really an amazing deal, considering that the average Pocket PC costs $300.
1. Buy a Compact Flash adapter for the GBA slot.
(Compact Flash happens to use the same pins as regular hard drives, but in a smaller connector and with more power.)
2. Solder little wires from the smaller CF connector to a larger Hard Disk connector.
3. Add a 5v line for power to the laptop HDD (12v if you're using a desktop drive)
4. Done!
The ______ Agenda
the interesting bit in the article was ide = compact flash , roughly. with this knowledge i wonder what one could do with a juicebox other than modding them into picture frames as has been previously done, i was thinking portable divx player..........
1. Trauma Center
2. Kirby
3. Nintendogs
4. The New Super Mario Brothers
5. Brain Age
6. Elite Beat Agents
Some might even apply to your tastes.
That having been said, Go GP2X!
The ______ Agenda
The harddisk requires a huge chunk of power.
So the whole setup includes :
a handheld gaming console.
a portable 2" harddisk - 40GB
a external huge lithium battery - 11 VDC
required additionnal DC-DC converter soldered between the HD enclosure and the battery.
And the overall make the perfect... huh... luggable setup.
Very nice : all the problems of a Nintendo DS player (image splitted between two tiny weeny screens) combined with the problems of a setup that needs a whole bag to be carryed around.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Who says you can only get one? I've got both and they're both pretty great for what I use them for. Both machines were well worth the money, IMO.
Also, saying the DS has "512x384 pixels of screen real estate" is both misleading and incorrect, considering it's split between two screens and almost always display different things at a given time. It's not a 512 pixel wide bye 384 high single large screen, but two 256 × 192 screens. In addition, when they are displaying the same scene continuously, they are more like a single 256x384 screen, which is not a practical resolution for things like videos, emulators, or PC game ports (which are often in a 4:3 aspect ratio). The "screen real estate" you described would be about twice what the DS actually has, and four times what a single screen has.
This poo is cold.
I solder SMT stuff all the time.
It's difficult to do it without flux, and even if you can do it, the results look like hell.
If you use flux and you do it right, the results will look identical to the original reflow-soldered work.
I'd love to see you solder some 0201s or a high-density connector without flux sometime.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Too much overlap to make it worthwhile for me. But sure, if you want and can afford both then why not?
I don't understand this comment. Why did you divide one of the dimensions by two?
Anyways, I agree with you, two smaller screens is not the same as one big screen, but still, the real estate is there and useful in a lot of contexts. Plus I love the stylus! (Though it's too bad you can't use it on both screens.)
256*192*2=98304 pixels
512*384=196608 pixels.
If you are combining the resolutions of the two screens, you only double one of the sides, not both of them.
This poo is cold.
Why, the DS has built-in wifi... high availablity anywhere kids gather!
Oops, right. Thanks for the correction.