I Turned A Broken Nintendo DS Lite Into A Gameboy Advance

so in my time repairing consoles and handhelds the thing that I probably saw the most was the DS Lite those things were broken constantly they would always come in with busted up screens or card slots or just something so I imagine there are a lot of them out there right now that are just busted maybe even one you have at your house now that doesn't do anything because it doesn't turn on but what if you could take it and make it into something pretty cool when actually usable maybe turn it into something like a Gameboy micro well there's a project that's been going on for quite a while now and it's a really cool thing I think to do to turn something that's old and broken into something that could be new for you and fun to have and that's called a Gameboy macro yeah we're gonna take 80s Lite and essentially turn it into one of these just a little larger and you don't need a lot of supplies or any of that to do it in fact I'm gonna try to use as little as possible when it comes to supplies that you would have to order and for the most part the soldering irons out of course but you're gonna need some common tools like screwdrivers obviously but not much else actually and because I've done so many repairs on these systems they have so many parts and busted up systems laying around I think I have the perfect though well that's that's why we have sponsors today's video is sponsored by the command shell from Manjhi protecting your switch when on the go is extremely important and finding a good case with solid build quality and extra features can be a headache but that's where the command shell comes in this case protects your switch all the way around while still giving the freedom of removing your joy con controllers on the fly in fact the added thickness of the casing on the Joye cons make holding them in single joy con play more comfortable I also like the straps on the back of each joy con so that when you're laying down holding on to the switch is actually a lot easier with the extra large kickstand on the back dropping the switch in the tabletop mode is very easy and with the 90 degree cable you can charge while playing currently Maji is offering a free charging cable and free shipping in the US for the command shell the command shell is currently retailing for 22 99 and you can check the link below to pick one up and also while you're there make sure you check out their command case with the unique lock and unlock feature as well once again thanks damaji for sponsoring today's video so today's exam of a broken that DS Lite is this blue one now this of course is the model where they kind of went to red or blue with the matte black back and I think this was probably one of the better-looking DS lights I know there's a lot of a lot of colors for the DS Lite but I really liked you the red or the blue with kind of the matte finish on the bottom rather than the colossi finish but this one does have a problem and I thought it'd be a great candidate for turning into a Gameboy macro now if we take a look at it you can see the the hinge is pretty bad right and unfortunately when you try to power it on we run into a problem you can see the bottom screen flashes right here and the top screen does nothing now what's being what's happening here is the system when you try to start it up it runs a self-check so it tests things before it actually powers on and that's why you usually have like a minute or two of delay when you go to turn a DES light on to when it actually powers on now this one seems to have a problem with the top screen and that could be a couple of things but based on the fact that it doesn't even show any signs of life and the fact that the hinge is this bad that tells me that most likely it is a broken connection with the cable that runs through here and it has to wind and loop around and usually there's like a metal guard a piece of metal in there that actually helps loop it around and that would end up cutting it at time so most likely that is our problem but the good news is if the bottom is fine we can turn this into pretty much a fully functioning Gameboy advanced micro slash I guess macro right it won't play gameboy or gameboy color games but it'll play a Game Boy Advance games perfectly fine with a really nice screen so we're gonna start by getting this guy apart now I said you will need a few supplies you will need some way to solder down a resistor and then you will need a resistor now the resistor that is recommended is a 330 ohm resistor and there is a full tutorial that's actually set up pretty well on a website that is like literally called the Gameboy macro comm and I'll link to that down below if you want to follow some written instructions those are the ones that I am actually gonna be following for this that I looked into and it's not bad it's honestly a pretty quick couple of steps and for the most part it comes down to just disassembling your DS Lite and then separating the top screen and being able to get the speakers out of that top screen that's it's pretty straightforward okay so we have the back off something I notice that was kind of interesting is that the little sticker down here for the water indicator is pink which may end up being a problem as this could end up being one that has seen some moisture it doesn't necessarily mean that it is dead or it's not going to work again but it could mean that it would be a little more work to get it working especially since this is also solid pink it should be like white and dotted but it's just solid that means that water got in and around most likely this card slot which will see the the thing with these lights is while the screens were pretty a pretty delicate at time specifically around that hinge the board itself was pretty solid I would say and I do see some very minor signs of corrosion now down here where this card slot is of course is one of the openings for the DS Lite island being up here and you could even say somewhat is the headphone jack charging port as well but it wasn't it was fairly well sealed I would say but it looks it looks alright like I don't see any obvious real signs of water damage other than just the stickers being a pink so I'm hoping we're okay so we had our two bumpers that we had to take off of there our Wi-Fi antenna actually snakes underneath of this DS light card slot which I know for a lot of people was the biggest pain in the world because when you would go to put this back together this has to come out so if you wanted to a top screen right this has to come out and then you also have to get this white cable out but the white cable wasn't the problem it was this guy like you'd have to snake this eye underneath of here and there are components the CPU is under there as well so you have to kind of navigate through it's very difficult to see through here but there are all kinds of little components under there and this seriously has to like snake around to get under there it was super frustrating and not something I look forward to and I worked on these let's have our little Wi-Fi card here now you want to make sure this goes back in a lot of people will forget and then it won't boot but it does need this it seems to boot so you want to make sure you have that back on there when you go to test it otherwise you may just guess what has ended up being a very simple reason why it doesn't boot and I'm doing all kinds of crazy stuff to it but a couple of screws here and believe it or not the motherboard is almost out there's not a lot that holds this DS Lite board down other than just a few screws for the most part okay so the board lifts up we got to flip it around up here because we do have a cable that's plugged in that's for the screen of course so this guy will come out after you unclip it and we have now freed the bottom board and this is good because this is the main part that we need for this project the good news here with this screen by the way it looks really bad right there but this appears to be a screen protector that was left on it I think it's still kind of dirty underneath of this screen protector somewhat yes but I think that'll clean off and I'm hoping that the screen itself looks good when we start it up we'll see about that one but we do have a very small clip right here that is for our touch digitizer so you want to unclip that very very carefully those break super easily and it is not fun when it does that so be very careful with that one the front screen for the LCD unplugs there and then our board is free and this is where we start to kind of take a look at how we are going to make this thing turn on without the need for that top screen because member it runs a self-check so we have to pretty much trick this thing into turning on without that top screen now this is where the soldering part comes in and as the soldering iron warms up I want to let you know how really this all works so when it does run that self check it turns out this is according to the GB macro website it turns out that it doesn't necessarily look for the screen completely it ends up looking for the screens backlight and the person running GBA macro managed to figure out that if they strung up a bunch of LEDs they could get the system to turn on without the need for that top screen and it turns out that with a correct resistor on the board just a little resistor between two dots you can actually trick the system into thinking there is a top screen when there is not and that's what we're about to do so on the board down here we have a couple of points we have led a two and then we have led c2 those are the two points that we want to join with a resistor you don't wanna just bridge them with solder or wire you actually want to use a resistor it seems that 330 ohm is the value that a lot of people are going with I've seen some people go with up to 750 but the guy that I saw mentioned 330 so I have a couple of resistors already laying around for three hundred and thirty so I'm just gonna go with that and while I'm on this side I also notice that there is a slight amount of corrosion there it doesn't look like anything too major so I'm hoping I can get away with this one but I'm just gonna go ahead and just kind of scrub this board down a little bit just with some rubbing alcohol just to clean it up really well so what I did here was I pulled some solder on both points it looks like they're a little further apart than the size of the resistor that I have here that I'm going to use so I might have to add a little extra solder just to make sure they connect but it shouldn't be too much of a problem alright as you can see we have our little resistor there connecting the points led a two and led c2 and what that should end up doing is making the system believe that there is a top screen which will allow it to now turn on so actually what I can do is we can see the condition of this bottom screen now because it did look like it may have got hit with some water and we can try to power it on with just this plugged in the Wi-Fi card and then a battery and see we get okay so I'm just gonna hold the battery here with my of my hand right there just so we can get a quick power on a see if it works and there we go okay so it does power on now no top screen touch screen is good let me see if I can hold that there while I grab something to touch it with touch screen also looks good alright so that at least for now looks fine we still need to get the speakers out of the top but really at this point if I wanted to close it up I guess I would be okay in the sense that if you just plug in headphones you should get sound but I guess we should at least put a speaker in just to get something out of it without headphones alright so this is where I move on to the top screen portion with the hinge I would take these out and clean them while you can get like what you should do is get like a thing at up like a Tupperware container fill it with hot water and some soap and literally just dump these in there and while you're taking this apart like why you're taking this part apart go in just let them soak like just next to you and then after you get the speaker and all that out you can pick these up and with a nice brush you can just start cleaning them and they should be almost brand new for the most part you might have some wear on the front of course from where you were pressing the buttons but it should at least be pretty clean at that point so we have to unscrew a couple of screws over here and we pretty much need to free this cable now one thing I can see is that there is corrosion here and I think the reason the top screen might not work this could have been dropped in like a puddle I've seen that happen where it hits like you know this part down submerges in a puddle the top part still kind of gets wet I guess that'd be the bottom just upside down but if the but if the top screen gets wet I have seen that get to the point where it won't even power on so we just need to undo a few screws here and we can free this casing part from the top so this is pretty much gonna be the face of our Game Boy macro there are a lot of really cool things people do with this they'll fill this in with like some some putty or bondo or whatnot they'll kind of chop this off and do the same thing here let it dry sand it down and then do all kinds of painting to it which is really really neat I'm not gonna do all of that because I know the average person probably won't because as it is here it's functional so we're just gonna go with the least amount of work possible to get us to the point where it plays Game Boy Advance games now in order to get this top shell open so we can get to the speaker's there are four screws under these little stickers and you start peeling these up they are Phillips head you unscrew them there and then we can actually slide the back casing off oh also here's our hinge right here that guy just kind of comes out the way it worked with the DS Lite it had this hinge on the side here and it was usually set to I think four different positions of course we had closed slightly open like kind of 90 degree almost then fully opened this hinge pretty much did all of that and usually you wouldn't have to replace this but I'd have a few times where it broke or wore down to the point where it couldn't hold up at all and that would I guess be kind of the case here but a lot of times that had more to do with the plastics around it that would end up wearing down so with your screws out you actually slide this kind of up like this because it has some latches inside and then you can actually lift this up boom there we go and we can see everything here so we have our speakers and our screen the screen is kind of glued in almost it has basically its own strip on the inside now we don't care about this screen obviously because we have some issues with it it's not working but usually you'd still want to be a little careful with it sometimes even have to put a little bit of heat on it to get it out of there but you can see kind of the metal part that I'm talking about here by the way this was to me a fault with the design of the DS light so you can see how we have this piece of metal right here now that was there to provide extra support right so like obviously we just have this plastic they put this piece of metal here so that it wouldn't bend or break super easily almost like its own little kind of skeleton there but the problem is it would rub against you can even see it a little bit there it would rub against this this cable that kind of comes out and then it shoots down what that ended up doing was rubbing against it as you open and close it and eventually it would even cut into this and I saw it all the time and it was yes a problem with this DS Lite so the way you would get this out of here we have to get these two cables so we have our Wi-Fi cable here we won't need that anymore because we're not doing Wi-Fi with Game Boy Advance games and then you have your microphone which is this white cable there we go and then we have our screen here and the way you would have to make this work you would have to twist this guy around and kind of let it work through that way otherwise you would damage your brand-new screen that you bought to replace your old screen with so it has to kind of do this little twisting motion to get it through this is one of the reasons people did not like working on DS lights or even DSis or eventually who 3ds is of the 3ds you had three different cables we have to spin through there was not fun but we now have our screen and the biggest thing we really want from this the only thing we really want at this point are one of the two speakers and we're gonna go with a single speaker so we're gonna remove this one I guess right here it is soldered down so we will of course need our soldering iron to remove that only two points it's pretty it's pretty straightforward so you can pretty much hold on to your your speaker here and you just touch the points and this guy will just pop right off and we're good so for this we're gonna go with SPR zero right here it's a little point and that's where we're going to put the positive end of our speaker they have them divided up on the chart here plus and minus we're gonna have to ground it to the headphone jack and this is so if you want sound of course outside of just I guess that headphone jack if you're fine with just plugging headphones in I guess you don't really need to do this for the speakers but I figure like I said we'll see how it all goes with with having sound see what the speaker can put out on its own with Gameboy Advance games and we also have to figure out how we're gonna route this because the the guide shows the speaker on the opposite side from where we're soldering it so I'm thinking we could probably get away with soldering it here running it behind that bottom screen we'll see how that works out after I put it together and then coming around here going right next to where that touch ribbon cable plugs in and then tuck any extras that I have underneath the game card slot that's my plan anyway so it can end up right where the guide has it which is right there so I went ahead soldered the speaker down on the front side and then I also grounded it to the headphone jack bottom there and hopefully with the speaker kind of flying all over the place I can power this guy on with a test and we get something out of that speaker that is at least audible like it's loud enough all right and let's see how it sounds just one speaker I think that's pretty good I think that's alright for what it is I mean let it hang down here for a second I think that's pretty good for a single speaker there just to kind of make this work with Gameboy Advance games I think that'll sound alright so I realize I'm trying to be very very cheap about this as that how many parts outside of the system I bring into it so I was trying to figure how I was gonna put this speaker down and attach it to the to the back you could use hot glue sticky pads that you order for example I decided I'm gonna actually pull some of the tape that they used for the top screen will cut a section out and it should be enough just to hold the speaker in place when we go to put it together and then of course the casing being on top of it will also help there we go just a little bit of a sticky tape there that should be enough to kind of hold this guy down when we go to screw it together so we have our speaker hooked up we got our screen everything looks pretty good we just got to put it together now so let's go and do that [Music] [Music] I'm about to put the bottom on and I want to stress this for anyone who has just recently taken idea slide apart for the first time and you're putting it back together I'm gonna give you a tip that will save you a massive headache because a lot of times when people are putting these back together for the first time they don't realize that these switches specifically the volume rocker and then the power switch have to line up with the switches on the board and they just go to jam it down and it actually breaks them so if you look here we have our power switch here and then we have our volume switch they are supposed to line up to these now the power switch is always going to be in the down position so you wanna make sure it's just down if it's up you'll end up breaking your power switch when you push down and then your volume switch I just leave it to maximum there on the left so you can see it's all the way over this is matching it and then when you go to push it down it will line up and then just pretty much click right in now as I'm putting this together I realized that the position of the speaker is actually crashing into the spot that we have our 4 where your stylus would go and I I guess the reason for that or the reason that they have it there is because they assume you're not going to be using your stylus anymore there's a lot of water damage here too you're not gonna be using your stylus anymore so that you would just automatically remove this and then your speaker would fit right in here which is fine it's just it's a to me it's a shame that that would be the route to go but I'm not really gonna be using this as a DES any longer so I guess it's not a massive deal anyway I'm just gonna go to remove this and drop the speaker down there now there there was a word that you could use a switch speaker which is smaller and that's in that position so that might be a route I would go but I guess technically with this hole here and the speaker you'd actually get some alright sound coming out of here maybe a little bit of mesh or something over that and you can actually leave that more or less as a speaker hole essentially for sound to come out of but yeah that seems to be anyway what they want you to do is to remove all of that so your speaker can sit right there well it's all together now so let's throw in some gameboy games and check it out so I have good old pokemon firered here and what you want to do is as soon as you get all this done you want to go into the settings you want to make sure of things--one I would definitely say you want to make sure that the Gameboy advanced is being played on the bottom screen because we do not have access to the top screen at this point even though the DS Lite thinks there's one there there isn't and then I would recommend because I think it's it's cool to do this it auto mode to where if you already have a gameboy advanced game in there it'll just start it up so now when we fired up with a gameboy advanced game in here it'll start up just like that acting like a gameboy advanced it will skip that main menu for the DS and it'll just jump into your game we have pokemon firered here let's see what the speaker sounds like in its placement I think that's pretty good I mean we have access to one speaker it's kind of down here coming out of the hole that we left where the stylus would go in I think that's pretty good the form factor itself is alright it's it's interesting I think it works how it is we're kind of used to having obviously a top screen here that is just missing but I think it fits in the hand pretty well we do of course still have the Gameboy advanced game itself still poking out of the bottom but your hands don't really go there anyway so that's not a big deal obviously we've dealt with that with the the DS Lite as it is the screen of course it's a it's a DES light screen it looks great and I think overall this is really neat still have the headphone jack down there you can plug in volume slider right there the DS cartridge slot is still available so if you have like an r4 card for example and you want to pop it in and play roms off of it you can still do that it'll just have to know that you're only having access to the bottom screen and I believe the r4 card has options for like mostly just bottom screen use especially for any Gameboy Advance games you're trying to play you know what I like it and in fact if we compare it to the Gameboy micro you can kind of get the idea why it's called a Gameboy macro because it really does look like just a bigger Gameboy micro I mean seriously it looks very very similar the only real differences I guess is that obviously this doesn't es light card slot is a little larger and the charge ports a bit different off to the side but uh I really I like this idea I think this is really neat and of course you could do all kinds of stuff beyond what we've done here this is like the bare minimum I mean seriously I I pulled that resistor off of a dead Super Nintendo game board like I didn't even order the resistor so yeah I went a little out there when it comes to not having to order much of anything but you can play around with the case people like I said shave these all off redo kind of the casing with some bondo and putty and sand it down and then paint it tons of customizable things you can do with this this is the overall really neat project well let me know what you guys think about the Gameboy macro and if you're thinking about making one I'll leave a link down below to the site that has kind of the written instructions and you can kind of look around at some of the other really cool things that they've been able to do on that site for this project it's just the neat thing I think if you have a DES light that is just broken anyway and it's sitting around and you kind of know it's the top screen that got smashed or damaged or maybe the system even had some water damage like this one sometimes just clean the board we'll fix it by the way but those ribbon cables will get damaged especially ones that go through the the hinge here and a lot of times removing that and doing this will at least give you a little Gameboy macro that you can play advanced games on pretty neat let me know guys we think about this down below once again thanks to Manjhi with a command shell for sponsoring the video make sure you guys like the video on the way out if you enjoyed it dislike it if not i'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: Spawn Wave

Views: 984,870

Rating: 4.8921576 out of 5

Keywords: gameboy, ds lite, gameboy macro, gameboy advance, video games, tech wave, build gameboy macro, how to build a gameboy macro, cheap, fix ds lite, fix broken ds lite, pokemon fire red, gba, gb, ds lite gameboy advance

Id: Yf9IpYw-Qfs

Length: 24min 34sec (1474 seconds)

Published: Sun May 17 2020