🎮 Ancient history of DSpacc

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

This thing of mine has seen dust, glory, war, and despair. This is exactly what I should have talked about today, what I did recently to remove some dust and thus bring my device back to glory. As I was writing, however, I realized how the context would have been confused if I hadn’t given the right space to the story; but alas, the story itself is long, and worthy of a detailed article, so here we are.

The beginnings

It all started when, at the age of about 6, I received this Nintendo DS Lite as a gift for my birthday… no, I’m not rambling, I’m getting there 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 scassone tablet. For me it was an absolutely indispensable battle object, necessary always and everywhere like my smartphone today, and perhaps for this reason it had a particularly intense life in its first years. I didn’t have a lot of games, because I only had 2 GB of memory in the flashcart and no physical games (apart from an obscure one, which I didn’t buy until later), but I had some of the top ones. In short, with Pokémon, all the main Mario games, and even stuff like Cooking Mama (which was very popular at the time), the enjoyment was always present.

[](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nintendo_DS_Lite_ (right_side).jpg) _A DS Lite.. not mine, for obvious reasons soon - Havok at en.wikipedia, CC BY 2.5 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5, via Wikimedia Commons _

The day of the smash

Despite a couple of flashcart mishaps - the first one mysteriously stopped working one day, the second was starting to show serious signs of failure after about 2 years - the little console fought and kept me entertained. One bad day at the beginning of July however, in the early afternoon, returning from the sea, my desire to play went crack, together with the plastic of the zipper when I opened the shell. Oh yes, exactly this is a “DSpacc”: a split DS. The name might not mean much, I’m aware of that, because not only did I coin it, but also very recently.

At the moment it seemed absurd to me that simply by opening the console, it could have broken; and it still seems absurd to me today, even though I have discovered that it is a very widespread problem: just type “nintendo ds broken” on any image search engine to notice how not only are the images showing the broken hinge the majority, but also how those depicting DS and DS Lite are the majority. It seems that, starting from the DSi, Nintendo has in fact redesigned the clamshell mechanism, which until then had proven unsuitable, and has further perfected it with the 3DS; evidently, the original did cahà.

The consequences of damage

Despair was about to set in, even though at the time the console continued to work perfectly, because a piece of the plastic on the right of the hinge had simply broken, which has the sole task of ensuring structural integrity. Despair really started to set in the moment I saw the colors on the screen start to shift as I moved the clamshell: there you have it, the cable of the display started to suffer damage. A little later, I think the same afternoon, I went with my father to a shop on the other side of town, to see how much a repair would cost. I don’t remember the price now, but I decided that it wasn’t worth it, and that it would be better to buy a nice 3DS, given the interesting games that had been released or were about to be released for the new family of consoles.

I don’t remember if I continued to use the DS Lite in the following days, because many of the titles I wanted to play required the upper screen, and I didn’t like gaming with diminished colors (today it doesn’t bother me too much, however). In any case, by the end of that week, after several searches in local shops in search of the cheapest price, I got my o3DS XL.. and that it’s a whole different story.

The Age of Dust

From this moment, of course, the old new DSpacc fell into the background. Maybe I still took it sometimes, at least for games like Animal Crossing that only require the bottom panel, because (according to the Diary app, certainly more precise than my memory) in the first 2 weeks of the 3DS I didn’t have anything to play with other than the system applications . Then, however, on the one hand I was slowly able to populate the new console with software, on the other hand the DS Lite continued to break - sooner rather than later, in fact, the upper display started to stop working completely, showing only a white screen with a black spot (?) - dust started attacking the DSpacc. As if that wasn’t enough, the flashcart one day said bye-bye! 🙄 Even after years, despite my new console, every now and then I still had to pick up the old one again… I’m not sure why, given that I couldn’t do anything special with it anymore, as I don’t have games on a dedicated card. that I could use without the top screen. Even years later, perhaps because over time I started collecting some original DS cartridges and felt like starting them, **sometimes I turned the DS Lite back on for a few minutes.

Everything was great, until, at a certain point, **I even played the SLOT-1 (the one for the DS cards) on the poor console! I remember that he showed some difficulty reading even original slips, but my other memories on the subject are very cloudy. I remember that when I looked inside the slot I saw some bent pins, and that I tried to insert something to straighten them, but in vain. I don’t think that by doing this I damaged others, but already at least 3 years ago (compared to the present) I remember that in the slot some pins were broken, missing… so, either when I stuck stuff in the port I weakened or even disconnected other pins without realizing it, or it is the occasional putting and removing of cartridges, in the hope that some would be read, which has broken the already weakened contacts (and it would be serious, because it would demonstrate the poor quality of the slot).

After this new unexpected event, I could certainly still, via Download DS, use the console for technically limited, volatile software, without the possibility of saving any configuration (or progress, in games), but let’s not beat around the bush: what do you do? useful and continuous like this? Practically nothing, and the console had therefore become a paperweight… until, some time later, at a fair I accidentally found and bought a Pokémon Ruby cartridge. Even though it didn’t even have a box, I had to have it: finally I could play something complete on my poor little console!

Edit arranged

However, that broken panel was starting to take its toll, literally. The split hinge unbalanced the weight of the entire device, and the top part of the shell remained hanging only thanks to the assorted cables. I had already discovered the concept of GBA Macro a while ago. For non-experts, it involves giving a second life to a DS that has lost its upper screen, to play titles (emulated, or not like the GBA ones, for which the console offers hardware backward compatibility) from previous consoles that their nature possessed only one screen. Online I was already seeing people creating their own personalized ones with uniquely hand-coloured bodies, or by adding LED tubes that create a neon effect, placed in place of the zipper. All fantastic stuff, but if I didn’t have the desire (and the way, at least at the time it couldn’t be found on Amazon.it) to buy a new display to properly repair the console, could I ever start spending on details which, however beautiful, are objectively superfluous?

I take a pair of scissors, and cut away the cables so the top half of the case remains attached to the main one. And this is it? Can we play again? Well, not exactly. To be honest, making a good Game Boy Macro requires some hardware work a little more elaborate than violently ripping away the broken screen, and for this reason my story has been a little troubled. First of all, a particular operation is practically mandatory, if you don’t want to lose the DS features: open the device and - in addition to properly disconnecting the display, speakers, microphone, and antenna cables, without cutting them - solder a small resistor on 2 testpoints of the motherboard. Normally, the console fails POST and shuts down if it doesn’t detect the top screen (namely, if it doesn’t detect the power draw it would expect from the top screen’s backlight); soldering a resistor of a value between about 300 and 1000 Ohm in the right places serves precisely to make the system believe that nothing is out of place.

However, I had done my searches on the Web, thus discovering that the POST is not performed to start a cartridge from the SLOT-2 (the GBA one), if **automatic start is set in the system settings ** of a game card if present. Well before committing my violent act therefore, because afterwards I would no longer be able to access the system menu, I set the automatic startup, and made sure that the bottom screen was selected as the panel used in Game Boy Advance mode. Once the crime is done, I see that the console works exactly the way strangers on the Internet had said: it’s practically a GBA, as if it had never been a DS… except that it doesn’t have speakers, because I have them cut away. 😅

A new plan

A little later, however, I started wanting things like Download DS mode.. or backlight adjustment. I decided to buy a kit of screwdriver bits online, which among many also included the damned bit for tri-wing screws, those screws loved by Nintendo exactly as much as they are hated by us idiots who buy their products. With my new very dangerous weapon (this is not my opinion, but that of those who insist on using shitty screws for the objects they produce) I can finally open my DSpacc, in order to solder the resistor .. resistor which I don’t have! But I have a piece of gum. Other kind souls on the Internet, in fact, illustrate how the conductive rubbers used for the buttons of the remote controls (and of the DS itself) often have the right resistance value needed in this case. As luck would have it, an old broken remote control I had on hand had suitable rubber pads: by cutting one, and holding it down with my finger on the infamous test points, the console turned on as before I cut the panel off. Here the hard thing was managing to fix that little thing to the motherboard, so that it made the right pressure, and therefore the right electrical contact, on the points where in theory soldering should be made - for the reason that the very word “welding” suggests. A few centimeters of electrical tape later, which I had to apply and reapply until I could secure it with the right tension, and it seemed that I was done; but fate decided to mock me.

Yet another trouble

Given that the great quality device - but not only it, now also “smart"phones for 15 years now - does not turn on without a battery connected (only with the external power cable, so to speak), and that it is only the plastic body that keeps the cell stuck and aligned, now that the console was disassembled I had to hold the battery with my hands close to the spring contacts, in those moments of a few seconds in which I simply wanted to verify that the console worked. Well, due to these maneuvers (and I only understood this later), perhaps due to my mishandling of the battery or who knows what, all of a sudden the DS no longer turned on! The POST didn’t fail like before, eh, but it just showed no signs of life. Despair rose quickly, 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 came to the conclusion that the fuse dedicated to the battery connection had just blown.

Don’t feel bad about me, but not having the resistor that I knew exactly I needed, could I ever have the fuse that I could never imagine would blow? I therefore had to make a beautiful bridge with tin… Come on, there’s no point making too many fuss about it, it will never happen that I connect by mistake, in the battery compartment, a more powerful energy source than that that the console circuitry can handle; the charging port fuse is separate, so it’s out of the question that a faulty power supply could discharge literal lightning into the console’s CPU.

Issue resolved

I would have liked to reconnect the speaker (the place is located in the lower part of the console) but, on the one hand, having cut the wire and my absolute incompetence in soldering some time (the photo of the jumper speaks for itself) - even if , to date, I know how to solder at least one wire on a large testpoint - and on the other hand the frenzy of closing everything in fear that my insulating tape disaster could move, I preferred to close everything and pretend nothing happened . At least, I still have the 3.5 jack port to listen to audio in headphones.

Subsequently (well 13 months later… I thought all this time that the console was beautiful to look at as it was?!?) I refinished the body** a little, mainly using sandpaper to completely flatten the other protrusion that normally serves the clamshell mechanism, bringing it to the state it still is in.

The sequel

Playing Pokémon Ruby on my new GBA Macro, much more compact and lighter than the DS in original form, took a whole new flavor**. I played for dozens of hours, but every now and then it occurred to me that I wanted to have fun with other things on the elegant console. Totally excluding DS flashcarts, because the slot is, as I said, dead, I looked at GBA ones. On Amazon.it, the only online store where I could and can buy, it seems to me that I found already at the time a scassona for no more than twenty euros, but I don’t know why *I just looked * - and I have done this more than once - without ever touching (buying).

So another good year has passed, and I’m just a few weeks ago. A bit randomly, I remember my DSpacc and, since I’m sorry about its being out of use, I try to do some slightly crazy stuff, which I talked about in [this entry from 2022-09-18 of the MicroBlog](./MicroBlog/2022-09-18- Quando-Metto-Mano-Io-Spacc.html). At this point, however, I am now entering the story of the contemporary age of the DSpacc, which has far too many implications to talk about. In the next detailed article on the topic there will be plenty of time to talk about how, finally, I dusted off this valiant gaming device in style, which still remains valid despite the bad luck.

Thanks for reading! If you found the story intriguing, then keep your eyes peeled for the sequel! 😄

Pss… The story regarding the Macro modification itself deserves a small dossier on its own, in my opinion. Thanks to the existence of old written messages I can compose it.. should I?