noblogo.org

Almost two months ago, somewhat casually the DSpacc came to mind; first as a concept, talking about it with people online, and then directly as the little thing I proudly own.

This thing of mine has seen dust, glory, war, and despair. This is precisely what I should have been talking about today, what I have done recently to remove some of the dust and thus restore my device to glory.
In writing, however, I realized how confusing the context would be if I did not give the story its due; but alas, the story itself is long, and worthy of a detailed article, so here we are.

The beginnings

It all begins when, at the age of about 6, I got this Nintendo DS Lite as a present for my birthday—no, I'm not digressing, I'll get to that now. For a good 3 years it was my only gaming console — and, for at least 1-2 of those years, my only gaming device, before I got the Galaxy Player or the badass tablet.
It was for me an absolutely indispensable battle object, needed anytime, anywhere on par with my smartphone to this day, and perhaps that is why it had a particularly busy life in its early years. Of games I didn't have a lot, because I had only 2 GB of memory in the flashcart and no physical games (apart from one obscure one, which I bought only later), but I did have some of the top ones. I mean, with Pokémon, all the major Mario, and even stuff like Cooking Mama (which was going a lot back in the day), the enjoyment was always there.

{[:MdTgtBlank:]} Un DS Lite.. non il mio, per ovvi tra poco ovvi – Havok at en.wikipedia, CC BY 2.5 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5{[:MdTgtBlank:]}, via Wikimedia Commons

Il giorno dello spacc

Nonostante un paio di disavventure tra flashcart – la prima un giorno smise di funzionare misteriosamente, la seconda stava iniziando dopo circa 2 anni a dare gravi segni di cedimento – la consolina combatteva e mi faceva divertire.
Un brutto giorno di inizio luglio però, nel primo pomeriggio, di ritorno dal mare, il mio desiderio di giocare fece crack, assieme alla plastica della cerniera quando aprii la conchiglia. Eh sì, esattamente questo è un “DSpacc”: un DS spaccato. Il nome poteva non dire molto, ne sono consapevole, perché non solo l'ho coniato io, ma anche molto di recente.

In the instant it seemed absurd to me that simply by opening the console, it could be broken; and it still seems absurd to me today, although I have discovered that it is a widespread problem: one only has to type “nintendo ds broken” into any image search engine to see that not only are the images showing the broken hinge the majority, but also that those depicting DS and DS Lite are the majority. It seems that, starting with the DSi, Nintendo in fact redesigned the clamshell mechanism, which had proven to be unsuitable up to that point, and further perfected it with the 3DS; evidently, the original did cahà.

The aftermath of the damage

Despair was about to take over, even though at the moment the console continued to function perfectly, because a piece of the plastic on the right side of the hinge, which is only meant to ensure structural integrity, had simply broken off. Despair began to take over for real the instant I saw that the colors of the screen began to offset as I moved the shell: there it was, the cable of the display started to suffer damage.
A little later, I think the same afternoon, I went with my father to a store across town to see how much it would cost a repair. The price I don't remember now, but I decided that it wasn't worth it, and that it would be better to just buy a nice 3DS, given the interesting games that had come out or were about to come out for the new console family.

I don't remember if I continued to use the DS Lite in the days that followed, because many of the titles I wanted to play required the higher screen, and gaming with the miniscent colors didn't appeal to me (to this day, it wouldn't bother me excessively, instead). Anyway, by the end of that week, after several searches of stores in the territory hunting for the cheapest price, I got my o3DS XL{[:MdTgtBlank:]}... and that's a whole other story.

The era of dust.

From this time, of course, the old new DSpacc ended up on the back burner. Maybe sometimes I would still pick it up, at least for games like Animal Crossing that require only the bottom panel, because (according to the Diary app, surely more accurate than my memory) in the first 2 weeks of 3DS I had nothing to play with other than the system apps. Then, however, on the one hand I was slowly managing to populate the new console with software, on the other hand the DS Lite continued to break down – more sooner than later, in fact, the upper display began to stop working completely, showing only a white screen with a black spot (?) – dust began to assail the DSpacc. As if that wasn't enough, the flashcart one day went bye-bye! 🙄
Even years later, in spite of my new console, I still occasionally kept getting a hold of the old one...not sure why, since I couldn't do anything much with it now, as I had no games on a dedicated card that I could use without a top screen. Even years later, maybe because over time a few original DS cartridges I started collecting and felt like booting it up, sometimes I would turn the DS Lite** back on for a few minutes.

All good, until, at one point, of the poor console I played even the SLOT-1 (the one with the DS cards)! I remember that it showed some difficulty in reading even original cards, but my other memories on the subject are very blurred. It comes back to me that looking inside the slot I saw bent pins, and that I tried to stick something in to straighten them out, but in vain. I don't seem to have damaged any others by doing so, however, as early as at least 3 years ago (compared to the present) I remember that in the slot some pins were split, missing... so either when I shoved stuff into the port I weakened or even detached other pins without realizing it, or it is the occasional putting in and taking out of cartridges, hoping that some would be read, that broke the already weakened contacts (and that would be serious, because it would show the poor quality of the slot).

After this new setback, certainly I could still, via Download DS, use the console for technically limited, volatile software, with no possibility of saving any configuration (or progress, in games), but let's not get around it: what useful, ongoing work is being done this way? Practically nothing, and the console had thus become a paperweight... until, some time later, at a trade show I happened to find and buy a cartridge of Pokémon Ruby. Although it was even without a box, I had to have it: finally I would be able to play something complete on my poor little console!

Arranged edit.

However, that broken panel was beginning to weigh, literally. The split hinge unbalanced the weight of the entire device, and the top of the shell remained hanging only thanks to the assorted cables.
I had discovered the concept of GBA Macro some time ago. For the uninitiated, it revises itself into giving a second life to a DS that has lost its top screen, to play titles (emulated, or not like the GBA ones, for which the console offers hardware backward compatibility) from previous consoles that by their nature possessed only one screen.
Online I was already seeing people creating their own custom ones with uniquely hand-colored shells, or adding LED tubes that make a neon effect, put in place of the hinge. All great stuff, but if I didn't feel like (and way, at least at the time it wasn't available on Amazon.co.uk) buying a new display to fix the console for good, could I ever put myself out of pocket for details that, however beautiful, are objectively unnecessary?

I take a pair of scissors, and cut away the cables so the top half of the shell remains attached to the main one. And that's it? You can go back to playing? Well, not exactly.
Actually, making a Game Boy Macro for good requires some somewhat more sophisticated hardware intervention than violently ripping off the broken screen, which is why my story was a bit troubled. First of all, a particular operation is practically obligatory, if you don't want to lose the DS functionality: open the device and — in addition to disconnecting perfectly the display, speaker, microphone, and antenna cables, without cutting them off — solder a small resistor on 2 testpoints on the motherboard. Normally, the console will fail POST and shut down if it does not detect the top screen (precisely, if it does not detect the current draw it would expect from the backlighting of the top screen); soldering a resistor of between about 300 and 1000 Ohms in the right places is precisely to make the system think that nothing is out of place.

However, I had done my own research on the Web, thus discovering that POST is not performed to boot a cartridge from the SLOT-2 (the GBA one), if in the system settings it is set to automatically start a game card if one is present. Well before committing my violent act therefore, because I would no longer be able to access the system menu afterwards, I set the auto-start, and made sure that the bottom screen was selected as the panel used in Game Boy Advance mode.
Having accomplished the crime, I find that the console works exactly the way strangers on the Internet had told me: it's basically a GBA, like it was never a DS—except it doesn't have speakers, because I cut them out. 😅

A new plan

A little later, however, I began to turn back things like the Download DS mode... or adjusting the backlight. I decided to buy a kit of screwdriver bits online, which among many included the darned tri-wing screw bit, those screws loved by Nintendo exactly as much as hated by us fools who buy its products.
With my new dangerous weapon (not an opinion of mine this, but of those who insist on using crappy screws for the items they produce) I can finally open my DSpacc, in order to solder the resistor. resistor which I don't have! But I do have a piece of rubber.
Other kind souls on the Internet, in fact, illustrate how the conductive grommets used for the buttons on remote controls (and on the DS itself) often have just the right amount of resistance that is needed here. As luck would have it, an old broken remote control I had on hand had suitable grommets: by cutting one off, and holding it down with my finger on the infamous testpoints, the console turned on as it had before I cut the panel off.
Here the hard thing was getting that grommet to the motherboard, so that it made the right pressure, and thus the right electrical contact, on the points where in theory a solder should be made – for the reason the very word “solder” suggests. A few inches of insulating tape later, which I had to apply and reapply until I was able to stop it with the right tension, and it looked like I was done; but fate decided to taunt me.

Yet another trouble.

Since the great device – but not only it, by now even the “smart “phones for the past 15 years – won't turn on without a battery connected (only with the external power cord, to be clear), and since it is only the plastic shell that keeps the cell stuck and aligned, now that the console was disassembled I had to hold the battery with my hands near the spring contacts, in those moments of a few seconds when I simply wanted to verify that the console was working. Well, because of these maneuvers (and I didn't realize it until later), maybe because of my mishandling the battery or who knows what, all of a sudden the DS wouldn't turn on! It wasn't failing POST like before, heh, but just no signs of life. Despair quickly rose, I had no idea what had happened and where to put my hands. It was only thanks to Ashfly, who was helping me in chat with my mess, I come to the conclusion that it had just blown the fuse dedicated to the battery connection.

Don't want to hurt me, but not having the resistor that I knew exactly I needed, could I ever have the fuse that I could never imagine burning out? I therefore had to make a beautiful jumper with tin.... Come on, there's no point in making too much fuss about it; it can never happen that I connect by mistake, in the battery compartment, a more powerful power source than the console's circuitry can handle; the charging port fuse is separate, so there's no way that a faulty power supply could discharge literal lightning bolts into the console's CPU.

Issue resolved.

I would have liked to reconnect the speaker (the place at the bottom of the console can be found) but, on the one hand having cut its wire and my utter incompetence at soldering time (the picture of the jumper speaks for itself) — although, to this day, at least one wire on a large testpoint I can solder — and on the other hand the frenzy to close everything up in fear that my tape disaster might move, I preferred to close everything up and pretend nothing happened. At least, I still had the 3.5 jack port for listening to audio on headphones.

Subsequently (well 13 months later... I thought all this time that the console was nice to look at put as it was?!?) I refinished the shell** a bit, mainly by using sandpaper to totally flatten the other protrusion that normally serves the clamshell mechanism, getting it to the state it still is.

The following.

Playing Pokémon Ruby on my new GBA Macro, which is much more compact and lighter than the DS in its original form, taken on a whole new flavor. I played it dozens of hours, but every now and then it occurred to me that I wanted to enjoy something else on the sleek little console as well.
Totally excluding DS flashcarts, because the slot is, as I said, dead, I looked at GBA ones. On Amazon.co.uk, the only online store where I could and can buy, it seems to me found already at the time a cash for no more than a twenty euros, but I don't know why I just looked – and did so more than once – without ever touching (buying).

So another abundant year has passed, and I come to just a few weeks ago. Somewhat randomly, I remember my DSpacc and, since I regret its being in disuse I try to make some crazy stuff, which I mentioned at this 2022-09-18 MicroBlog entry.
At this point, however, I am now getting into the narrative of the contemporary age of DSpacc, which has far too many implications that I need to talk about. There will be plenty of time in the next detailed article on the subject to talk about how I finally dusted off this valuable gaming device in style, which still remains viable now despite bad luck.

Thanks for reading! If you found the story intriguing, then keep an eye out for the sequel! 😄

---

Pss. The story concerning the Macro edit itself would deserve a separate little dossier, in my opinion. Thanks to the existence of the old written messages I can compose it. should I?

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)