Teased earlier this week by the hacking group Lost Nintendo History was a homebrew release that would add TV-out to the Nintendo DS Lite, through the use of CFW and an open hardware circuit board. Today, the team managed to deliver on their promises by uploading their release on GitHub, as well as writing up an explanation of their process on their website. According to them, they'd found out that there was a TV-out feature leftover in the DS Lite's SoC, and that with some effort, they would be able to restore the function, allowing anyone to output their DS on their TV without having to resort to extra "bulky or cumbersome hardware" to do so.

Available only and specifically on the DS Lite, the method involves the custom firmware flashME, which reenables the TV-Out feature normally disabled on boot. Twilight Menu and a DS flashcart are also used, in order to boot the NDS_TV_OUT_ENABLE.nds file. Finally, you'll need a circuit board, of which the schematics, gerber file, and finer details are provided in the GitHub release. All of these things combined allow for you to play your DS Lite on your TV, with audio. You can output one screen at a time, and switch between the top or bottom with a single press of a switch on the circuit board. An installation guide and writeup are available on the project's GitHub, linked below.

On December 2020, we discovered that the Nintendo DS Lite's SoC (System on Chip) had a hidden feature: a leftover TV(Television) composite video output signal. This project contains our hardware designs and software code to restore this hidden feature and make it usable again. More details here

Contents

• Schematics & design & BOM
  • Can be found in this respository under /pcb
• Production Files
  • Gerber files are available in the releases page
• Documentation
  • Some base explaination of how the system works, how the PCB and software act altogether, etc. can be found here after the Installation section
• Tutorials
  • For a quick installation/usage tutorial, click here
  • Video Tutorial coming later this month

Acknowledgements
This project wouldn't be possible without the contributions of Gericom, Nitehack and pedro-javierf.

Source
Download Link

 

[Jokey_Carrot]

That's true, but most people weren't using it in 2004. Most people would just hook up their spiffy new PS2 or Xbox to a CRT, or, if they were really well off, some plasma screen or projection TV that hits 720p at best.

Composite can't take over 480i. so anybody with a hd crt or plasma screen would be missing out.

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The DS is 256x192 per screen. If you expect it to *not* look like shit after you blow it up to 1080p/4K with the garbage internal scaler in your TV, I have a bridge to sell you. If you want to go through some extra shenanigans I'm sure you can split the signal into RGB and use SCART instead - I personally never had any trouble with Composite unless the shielding was inadequate. Then again, I also grew up on a 20 inch CRT TV with a mono speaker playing NES games, so maybe my requirements in terms of picture quality aren't as extravagant.

240x160 gba games look fine blown up on my screen over a sharp vga signal. Composite on a crt looks fine but on any modern screen it looks like shit, and most tv's will probably try to deinterlace any progressive signal over composite which will make it look even worse.

 

[duwen]

Guess will be seeing NDS consolizer kits soon then.

 

[Deleted User]

Wow, this is crazy!!

 

[Deleted member 668561]

For those complaining about composite, the is nitro capture box uses composite, and that thing was several grand, though it had it's own hardware for video output and scaling

And that thing looks immaculate, there were also 3rd party homebrew addons that required tapping the lcd signals, and feeding that into a custom fpga for video capture, think it supported usb capture only iirc


Doesn't matter what video standard you use, it's not gonna make 256x192 look any better

Composite supports a resolution of 720x480

Svideo support up to 600x480 (better color reproduction), this is just composite video sent over 4 lines (greyscale,color,sync,ground) and not 1 (the atari 2600 actually natively displays svideo this is eventually mixed into composite then rf)

 

[Idaho]

Will anyone mod the DS to have a video port out and maybe even a sort of dock? The Switch before it was cool...

 

[UltraSUPRA]

This would be cooler if it was on the 3DS. The Wii U already had DS virtual console games, and that's how we all hacked ours.

 

[Kwyjor]

This would be cooler if it was on the 3DS.

The 3DS already has NTR CFW and Snickerstream. Of course, that's far from ideal, but then it's also absolutely free.

 

[weatMod]

both of the last 2 hyperlinks go the same place and neither one of them has any tutorial on how this thing is even supposed to connect tot he DS or any schematics of the board
it would be impossible for anyone to use this with no schematic of explanation of how to even connect it to the DS lite

 

[Foxi4]

both of the last 2 hyperlinks go the same place and neither one of them has any tutorial on how this thing is even supposed to connect tot he DS or any schematics of the board
it would be impossible for anyone to use this with no schematic of explanation of how to even connect it to the DS lite

The circuit board diagram is in the repository, the instructions are in the Source link.

 

[weatMod]

The circuit board diagram is in the repository, the instructions are in the Source link.

no there are no instruction just gerber files there is no information about how the board is supposed to even connect to the DS lite anyplace
all it says is you lose the upper screen to connect it , nothing more

 

[Foxi4]

no there are no instruction just gerber files there is no information about how the board is supposed to even connect to the DS lite anyplace
all it says is you lose the upper screen to connect it , nothing more

...use the ribbon connector? As shown in the picture?

 

[weatMod]

...use the ribbon connector? As shown in the picture?

there are no pictures and there are no diagrams
unless you mean the 2 shot with a potato from 3 miles away

 

[Foxi4]

there are no pictures and there are no diagrams
unless you mean the 2 shot with a potato from 3 miles away

Bill of Materials
Full schematic

Everything you need is on the repo.

 

[godreborn]

I'd be a bit afraid to open up the ds. the 360 and stuff is fine, but my ds holds special sentimental value for me. I bought it in Akihabara, Japan. I didn't know much about it, but I bought it with my second friend who's name is also Paul. that's why I won't try flashme either.

 

[Foxi4]

I'd be a bit afraid to open up the ds. the 360 and stuff is fine, but my ds holds special sentimental value for me. I bought it in Akihabara, Japan. I didn't know much about it, but I bought it with my second friend who's name is also Paul. that's why I won't try flashme either.

It's actually surprisingly simple and easy to disassemble/reassemble. The only tricky part is the small ribbon connector for the touchscreen (marked P6, I believe) - the clip likes to pop off if you open it too wide, there's no reason to touch that part at all.

 

[weatMod]

I'd be a bit afraid to open up the ds. the 360 and stuff is fine, but my ds holds special sentimental value for me. I bought it in Akihabara, Japan. I didn't know much about it, but I bought it with my second friend who's name is also Paul. that's why I won't try flashme either.

you probably buy one from ebay with a broken top screen for dirt cheap for this project if it ever gets better documentation or a commercial chip becomes available

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Bill of Materials
Full schematic

Everything you need is on the repo.

ok i see it , god i fucking hate trying to navigate shit hub , it' a nightmare
but still very poorly documented al i see are block diagrams and no real schematics except for the buttons i can't even really tell what i am looking at
there a re no specific schematics for most of it just bloc diagrams
i could not work with that

 

[Foxi4]

For those complaining about composite, the is nitro capture box uses composite, and that thing was several grand, though it had it's own hardware for video output and scaling

And that thing looks immaculate, there were also 3rd party homebrew addons that required tapping the lcd signals, and feeding that into a custom fpga for video capture, think it supported usb capture only iirc


Doesn't matter what video standard you use, it's not gonna make 256x192 look any better

Composite supports a resolution of 720x480

Svideo support up to 600x480 (better color reproduction), this is just composite video sent over 4 lines (greyscale,color,sync,ground) and not 1 (the atari 2600 actually natively displays svideo this is eventually mixed into composite then rf)

The big concern with composite is that all colours are sent on one conductor, plus they're subject to interference from the two audio channels if the cable is poorly shielded. This isn't exactly the end of the world and nowadays you can just emulate the platform to get a pixel perfect signal over HDMI instead, but it's a neat little project regardless, especially for building something like the Jumbotron DS, if anyone remembers that. Plenty of cheap Chinesium screens use Composite, for instance the ones that are used for parking cameras. You could probably reuse one of those PCB's to add a substantially larger top screen to the console, something I've always wanted to do.

ok i see it , god i fucking hate trying to navigate shit hub , it' a nightmare
but still very poorly documented al i see are block diagrams and no real schematics except for the buttons i can't even really tell what i am looking at
there a re no specific schematics for most of it just bloc diagrams
i could not work with that

There's one block diagram to show you the connections and three pages of standard schematics, one for each section of the board. That, coupled with the PCB's gerber, should be more than enough to assemble it. All you really need to do after installing the software is plug the ribbon from the P3 connector on one end and your composite cables on the other, there's not that much going on.

 

[Deleted member 323844]

Failed to fetch tweet https://twitter.com/Nitehack/status/1362511962660347907

This looks so cool.

 

[Foxi4]

Okay, the 2 in 1 mode is actually pretty dope.

 

[Deleted member 323844]

Okay, the 2 in 1 mode is actually pretty dope.

And it looks 100% configurable (size, transparency, etc).