Team restores "leftover" DS Lite TV-out feature with CFW and circuit board

m9rQle7.png

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
  • 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.

:arrow: Source
:download: Download Link
 

Kwyjor

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You can’t use NTR or snicker stream while I’m TWL mode
But of course. Fortunately that will now be possible with the DS Lite.

(Of course, this still makes it unfeasible to inexpensively stream DSiware or software running at TWL clock speed, but that's not much of a concern.)
 

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

That's true, but those were niche cases in '04. Nobody I knew at the time had one, anyways. Not to mention that Nintendo has never been one for pushing the envelope in graphical fidelity, so it wouldn't surprise me to see this only having composite output even in an official release.

The DS Lite is also a console with relatively weak specs, so I don't know if it even has the hardware to output anything above 480i. If I remember correctly, though, the two inbuilt screens are progressive scan.. So at some point, we might see someone get 480p with composite out of it, but this is still a pretty impressive breakthrough on its own.
 
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That's true, but those were niche cases in '04. Nobody I knew at the time had one, anyways. Not to mention that Nintendo has never been one for pushing the envelope in graphical fidelity, so it wouldn't surprise me to see this only having composite output even in an official release.

The DS Lite is also a console with relatively weak specs, so I don't know if it even has the hardware to output anything above 480i. If I remember correctly, though, the two inbuilt screens are progressive scan.. So at some point, we might see someone get 480p with composite out of it, but this is still a pretty impressive breakthrough on its own.
You need 480p over component because most tv's will deinterlace 240p despite it being a progressive resolution, leading to a shaking screen and visual artifacts..

--------------------- MERGED ---------------------------

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)
"
"Doesn't matter what video standard you use, it's not gonna make 256x192 look any better" - complete bullshit, rgb or even s-video (Which only uses two lines to transmit video, ground doesn't count and sync is built into the luminance signal) would make the image look substantially sharper and remove the tell tale signs of composite video such as rainbow banding.
"Composite supports a resolution of 720x480" - Resolution has nothing to do with the quality of the signal and composite only supports this resolution over an interlaced mode, furthermore most modern tv's will deinterlace 240p over composite leading to visual issues.
 
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You need 480p over component because most tv's will deinterlace 240p despite it being a progressive resolution, leading to a shaking screen and visual artifacts..

--------------------- MERGED ---------------------------


"
"Doesn't matter what video standard you use, it's not gonna make 256x192 look any better" - complete bullshit, rgb or even s-video (Which only uses two lines to transmit video, ground doesn't count and sync is built into the luminance signal) would make the image look substantially sharper and remove the tell tale signs of composite video such as rainbow banding.
"Composite supports a resolution of 720x480" - Resolution has nothing to do with the quality of the signal and composite only supports this resolution over an interlaced mode, furthermore most modern tv's will deinterlace 240p over composite leading to visual issues.

Svideo uses 4 lines chorma (color), luma (greyscale), and two grounds,which acts as a twisted pair

You NEED all 4 for svideo, and you include ground because no circuit works without ground

url(3).gif


Yes it doesn't matter how much you clean and fix up the video signal 256x192 is 256x192, you're not gonna magically have native 720p or 1080p
Just by simply having rgb or hdmi,vga signal,

Composite isn't that bad,and the color issues it has are mainly due to:

A. Your tv

B. Your cabling

C. The console itself



you're saying that 256x192 resolution looks the same as 1920x1080?
 
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Composite isn't that bad,and the color issues it has are mainly due to:
Imo composite is REALLY bad, no matter if you use a good upscaler, good cables or good source. You can't just get good upscaling when the colors are mixing between each other, among tons of artifacts, of course.

Here I'm upscaling Nokia N95 8GB composite signal (the only signal Nokia offered on Symbian) through XRGB-Mini, using the official Nokia cables (really good quality, like everything Nokia did back in the day).



It just doesn't look right. While on RGB you would not distinguish it from an emulator.

Having said that, I'm still interested in this mod, it is pretty cool.
 
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Svideo uses 4 lines chorma (color), luma (greyscale), and two grounds,which acts as a twisted pair

You NEED all 4 for svideo, and you include ground because no circuit works without ground

View attachment 248379

Yes it doesn't matter how much you clean and fix up the video signal 256x192 is 256x192, you're not gonna magically have native 720p or 1080p
Just by simply having rgb or hdmi,vga signal,

Composite isn't that bad,and the color issues it has are mainly due to:

A. Your tv

B. Your cabling

C. The console itself



you're saying that 256x192 resolution looks the same as 1920x1080?
You don't count ground wires as signal wires. I never said 256x192 would become hd I just said it'd be less blurry and look all round better with an s-video or rgb signal. Composite is just shit. No matter how good your cables are you're still Cramming luma, chroma and sync into one cable.
 

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The nds max res is 256x192 4:3; do you really need hdmi for this...s-video or rgb tecwould be really all you need, composite is capable of max 720x480


--------------------- MERGED ---------------------------



Devkits have extra hardware and are more powerful than their retail counterpart, effectively a more pc spec version of the console, more ram, extra cpu power, and hardware specific to software engineers

The is nitro box contains all the hardware,the nds that's attached is just a "dummy" unit
Yes. 256x192 doesn't scale up well to 480i/576i. That means you are either left with big fat borders or ugly non-integer scaling. Fine if you're just connecting it directly to a capture card, you can crop it in your capture software. If you actually want to play games on a TV/monitor, 1080p is optimal because at that point non integer scaling is hardly noticeable so you can stretch the image to fill the full screen.
Also, composite was a bad choice. I thought we were past using that for stuff. Hell, modern TVs don't even support it anymore.
 

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Imo composite is REALLY bad, no matter if you use a good upscaler, good cables or good source. You can't just get good upscaling when the colors are mixing between each other, among tons of artifacts, of course.

Here I'm upscaling Nokia N95 8GB composite signal (the only signal Nokia offered on Symbian) through XRGB-Mini, using the official Nokia cables (really good quality, like everything Nokia did back in the day).



It just doesn't look right. While on RGB you would not distinguish it from an emulator.

Having said that, I'm still interested in this mod, it is pretty cool.


If you look at the output from the is-nitro capture looks pretty damn good for composite, though again it has extra hardware to process and scale

And those artifacts can be used to your advantage,

Atari8.png


--------------------- MERGED ---------------------------

Yes. 256x192 doesn't scale up well to 480i/576i. That means you are either left with big fat borders or ugly non-integer scaling. Fine if you're just connecting it directly to a capture card, you can crop it in your capture software. If you actually want to play games on a TV/monitor, 1080p is optimal because at that point non integer scaling is hardly noticeable so you can stretch the image to fill the full screen.
Also, composite was a bad choice. I thought we were past using that for stuff. Hell, modern TVs don't even support it anymore.

Actually they still do, usually now composite and component share the same connector, unlike crt most modern lcds are multisystem, ntsc,pal,secam, pal60
 
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If you look at the output from the is-nitro capture looks pretty damn good for composite, though again it has extra hardware to process and scale

And those artifacts can be used to your advantage,

View attachment 248418

--------------------- MERGED ---------------------------



Actually they still do, usually now composite and component share the same connector, unlike crt most modern lcds are multisystem, ntsc,pal,secam, pal60
That was true a couple years ago. That connector is now gone on most new TVs. And component support is gone with it.
 
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I've always thought of the DS lite as some real good engineering work. (stepping up from older circuitry that was OG DS).
Now I know another reason.
 

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godreborn

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Consider yourself lucky ;)
By the time you are buying your next TV, they'll be completely gone.


I was afraid of that. I think I'd rather have an aftermarket capture solution, in that case.

I would have to agree. when I was at best buy, I asked for a tv with component and vga, and the salesperson said that almost all new tvs have hdmi only, so they didn't have a tv like that. I had to go to video revolution, and they only had one tv with both of those inputs (this was about three or four years ago). I still have it in my bedroom. I no longer need either though with a framemeister and my receiver can upconvert composite to component, then the framemeister can convert component to hdmi. my receiver is ancient, so it has no hdmi on it.
 
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Consider yourself lucky ;)
By the time you are buying your next TV, they'll be completely gone.


I was afraid of that. I think I'd rather have an aftermarket capture solution, in that case.

I would have to agree. when I was at best buy, I asked for a tv with component and vga, and the salesperson said that almost all new tvs have hdmi only, so they didn't have a tv like that. I had to go to video revolution, and they only had one tv with both of those inputs (this was about three or four years ago). I still have it in my bedroom. I no longer need either though with a framemeister and my receiver can upconvert composite to component, then the framemeister can convert component to hdmi. my receiver is ancient, so it has no hdmi on it.

IMG_20210224_110548.jpg
IMG_20210224_110622.jpg

IMG_20210224_110450.jpg

Well every lcd tv Ive had, had composite, rf, dvi sometimes, usually youll get vga

--------------------- MERGED ---------------------------

Forgot about this, got it for free, needs a $70 bulb, turns out it's still a 3-400$ tv

Thought Mitsubishi made cars.....

IMG_20210224_111510.jpg
IMG_20210224_111541.jpg
 

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I was reading a while ago that some people actually preferred the composite output of the Wii over the component-out because the blurriness helped to disguise how low-res the graphics are. I guess no one here feels that way.
 

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I was reading a while ago that some people actually preferred the composite output of the Wii over the component-out because the blurriness helped to disguise how low-res the graphics are. I guess no one here feels that way.
You could just use a component cable and smear vaseline on your screen.
 

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Hmm. I was toying with the idea of bringing back CRTs for the gaming set at one point. If I can get an even easier in and just include a decoder board with several sets of old school inputs (maybe even some nice cables in the box) and abilities to handle resolutions as seen in 8 and 16 bit consoles of various regions then spares the hassle of sorting CRT shipping too.

I will have to +1 the TVs seem to be shrinking inputs thing. Had to do a CCTV setup for someone with an old setup the other month and his very nice shiny TV had a little super thin wire dangly extension with about 4 HDMI ports on that went under the TV. Fortunately he had a nice old amp.
 

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