(Transcribed from image)Merki on Discord said:
Source (Japanese)English SourceMerki's Sitethe thing is almost all of the parts are easy to come by. the custom pcb and ribbon cable arent but everything else can easily be bought off of something like digikey
That's very interesting...I do have an old sky3ds cart that I don't use anymore, so I might sacrifice it's case for experimentation. Using savedata pins with SPI is kinda questionable in the speed aspect. Maybe it's possible to use general data pins if Ninty didn't wire them directly into a emmc controller(though it seems like that might be the case). I think that guy's solution failed cause he tried using a replacement NOR chip, which, as 3dbrew states, needs to meet specific requirements in order to communicate with a 3ds properly using it's vanilla APIs.
Hell yeah they're even cheaper that that! I remember finding an image with a katsukity board online and tried reading letters on the ICs. I found identical FPGAs sold on aliexpress for basically nothing. And the other chip is just a usb controller. I bet this board doesn't even do any compression of the data, it just sends the raw 8bpc rgb over the usb(the fpga just probably acts mostly as a shift register to turn the parallel binary signal into serial and probably muxes all the data togerther to just shove it into the usb ic). They just have a custom driver on the PC end to allow their program to read that data.
Its too late his shop had to be shutdown you can buy his product from the European site, but even support wont make much of a difference now
I was wondering about this, I don't want to pay the high cost for the USB mod, especially when I have an elgato. But whenever I tried to look this up, I would just get results for the USB mod and instructions on how to use it to play 3DS on tv via a laptop
The switch outputs HDMI through it's USB port so I'm sure someone could figure out a cheap option
Afaik, it would actually be more expensive since hdmi is a patented technology and companies owning patents like to charge way too much with their fees. If you want to play 3ds games on a TV then it would make sense, but if it is just for capture then the usb method will be better, especially considering that line doubling(or any other scaling for that matter) can be done in the recording software like OBS. If I ever get to building a 3ds vga agapter(as described in the post you quoted), I'd hook it up to a crt monitor that I have laying around. 3ds's video would certainly look much better on a crt and the fact that most crts have analogue sync circuitry means thag it will accept the native 3ds vsync and hsync frequencies(I actually tried checking it by simulating it with nvidia graphics settings on my pc and it did pick ip and display the signal correctly). The advantage of a vga adapter is that making it is as simple as eating a cake: just three DACs(maybe with something to compensate for slop in pixel clock, but idk how precise 3ds's screen timing is) and a VGA connector, some soldering...figure out how to put the console together with all the wires...profit?(question mark cause I haven't tested if this actually works, but it should)
Yes. He stuck around through the DS era, where relevant to this he made the jumbotron DS https://web.archive.org/web/20140527065357/https://home.comcast.net/~olimar/DS/jumbotron/ , and then some work for the 3ds one but that I am less familiar with.
You could probably get some company in China to manufacture the PCB you can get your hands on a schematic or trace the circuit yourself. Not sure about the ribbon cable though.
There are a lot of services for manufacturing custom made PCBs that aren't even based in China(though I guess chinese ones would be the cheapest). Making custom ribbons is problematic, but I guess if putting the console together with minimal external mods isn't the goal, then you could just use thin wires for this. Of course, doing it with wires will be a total mess and won't fit into the console, but for a diy solution it could be good enough
"USB port" doesn't mean "USB" though - it could be a so-called "alternate mode" where an actual video signal is output when an appropriate accessory is identified, as opposed to having an actual USB graphics card
There are fab shops covering most things you would want to do, however if you do find a ribbon cable manufacturer willing to do small volume runs please do share. Several times in the past I have tried to contact any number of such companies with very serious offers for some low volume stuff and as about as good as it got for replies to emails were automated out of office messages, and those few with phones did not come back from the automated systems.
