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

Worst headline ever!

[Sinryc]

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...).

Re:Worst headline ever!

[kaos.geo]

Yeah, for a moment I thought I missclicked and was reading The Onion. :-)

Re:Worst headline ever!

[Sivar]

"This is SLASHDOT! Why does someone need a reason other than "why not" to mod something?"

"Why not?" seems to be the only reasoning behind the Slashdot mods sometimes...

Paris Hilton + touch screen + mic

[antifoidulus]

=the newest innovation in porn.

Re:Paris Hilton + touch screen + mic

[kfg]

I know where her touch screen has been and I wouldn't do her with somebody else's stylus.

KFG

Use flux???!

[mangu]

Dont forget to use flux! It comes in different forms, but I use the paste you can see above. Flux is the magic ingridient that makes soldering easy.

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...

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.

Re:Use flux???!

[SigILL]

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...

Not that I RTFA, but try doing SMT with just the flux in your solder.. not gonna work.

A true hacker is beyond such dogmatic attitudes; (s)he uses the tools needed to get the job done. If flux is what's needed to get a good solder connection, then (s)he'll use flux.

Re:Use flux???!

[Spankophile]

hey "dude' instead of bitching about someone's choice of solder, try doing something useful. This guy made an IDE mod for DS. He's way 1337er than you. so STFU.

Re:Use flux???!

[Dan East]

Who needs flux for SMT? Just use a toaster oven.

Dan East

Re:Use flux???!

[SigILL]

Just use a toaster oven.

Er...

If you read that article you'll see that they use solder paste, which is essentially flux with a bit of solder mixed in.

Re:Use flux???!

[TeknoHog]

Another quote from the article that just oozes unprofessionalism:

I cut my 80-wires IDE cable to 50 wires, then I stripped both ends with my fingernails

And all this to make a CF to IDE adapter that should be available easily.

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

Homebrew compatibility

[weg]

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)

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..

Re:Drunken Sailors need more storage?

[finiteSet]

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?

Yep, you guessed right, it's Deloused Sundancer.

I dare you to mod me informative ;)

The future for Nintendo DS owners?

[Gnomes of Zurich]

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...

[Davus]

We all know where this is going. I'm looking forward!

O Natrium42, is there anything you can't do?

[Anonymous Coward]

The legendary Natrium42 has been hard at work on making an IDE connection for the DS.

Ahh yes, it always brings a wistful smile to my lips whenever I recall the many legends of Natrium42, taught to me by my forefathers in front of our cooking-fire...

Re:O Natrium42, is there anything you can't do?

[badboy_tw2002]

Yeah, the first 41 kind of sucked, but this guy is getting it right!

Re:Drunken Sailors need more storage?

[weg]

Yeah.. I totally agree.

It's like this PC thing that everybody seems to be talking about nowadays..
I have no idea what the fuck it means.. Post-Communist? But why would somebody like to have one at home, then? Particle Collider? I've heard the one in Switzerland has a diameter of several miles, but my friend told me he has a PC at home and his flat isn't that large.

I'm confused.. ;-)

Re:DS = Handheld game console

[Just Some Guy]

If you don't know what a DS is, other websites may be more appropriate than Slashdot.

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 ..

For the truely demented

[Tycho]

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.