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."

Comments

DS = Handheld game console

[infolib]

If you didn't know either, check wikipedia

Besides...

[mangu]

...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.

Re:Besides...

[fabs64]

or anything galvanised.
Though be warned, that crap stinks when the flux dissolves it

Re:Use flux???!

[MyDixieWrecked]

I've got limited experience with electronics soldering (I took a class in middleschool and I also needed to do some work on my guitar, once), but iirc, not all electronics solder has flux in/on it. personally, I'd prefer the stuff with the flux on it already, since it's less messy.

When it comes to doing soldering involving plumbing (I was a plumbers apprentice in HS), I know most solder is packed with flux, plus we always smeared flux all over the pipe-end beforehand, too, before hitting it with the torch.

perhaps it's his preference to control the amount of flux he uses himself, rather than relying on the manufacturer of the solder to put the right amount in.

Modding a DS: What you see is what you need

[tepples]

They need to get it done with a flash drive.

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.

Re:Battery life

[weg]

Unfortunately, DS delivers only 3.3V to GBA slot and so an external 5V power supply is required. I used a 11.1V li-poly battery and a DC-DC converter to bring the voltage down to 5V.

Since he's using an external power supply, I guess that the HD doesn't drain that much from the DS battery..

Mirror

[m0RpHeus]

Here's a mirror just in case the link gets Slashdotted.

Re:Not so hard to do on other portable game consol

[torpor]

oh, i dunno .. for sure, the GP2X, a linux handheld console, has thousands, and thousands of games you can play on it. it truly is a massive collection, more than you would think, and not just TuxRacer or fortune, yo .. we're talking the sum total of a rather rapidly growing list of emu's, from EDSAC to Atari to Nintendo to the Arcades, and on into the 32-bit console territories..

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 .. and all, relatively, easily accessible to anyone, not just nintendo-licensees..

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 .. admittedly, there are a lot of emu's on there, so thats not 'strictly linux only games', but when you've got ("Sega", "Nintendo", "Gameboy", "Atari", "MAME") on-board, the fact its a linux box is only a bonus.. powermanga is a great bash, the newly ported clonk planet 2x very fun for the train rides, vektar a worthy contender (though i'm going to port MaesltromSDL myself sooner or later, if someone else hasn't already done it), and there are just too many great things to do in the GP2X emu scene for me to even list ..