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

 

[ClancyDaEnlightened]

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.

best crt tv hands down will give any pvm a run for their spec, these types of crts were not produced within the usa, this was bought from ramstein in germany in the late 80/Early90s, have not found another, you dunno how long I've been looking

 

[FAST6191]

best crt tv hands down will give any pvm a run for their spec, these types of crts were not produced within the usa, this was bought from ramstein in germany in the 1980s, have not found another, you dunno how long I've been looking
View attachment 248452 View attachment 248454

Believe me I am still kicking myself for not buying up the mountain of 40+ inch widescreen CRTs with multiple component+composite+scart+RF inputs from charity shops when everybody decided the first gen of LCD* flatscreens were in and they were flooded with them and letting them go for "we want the floor space back" prices.

*plasma was always niche, at least until it to got silly cheap and several shops wanted to liquidate their stock.

 

[orangy57]

Btw, Nitehack has confirmed that composite is a SOC limitation, so there wont be other signals for the board.

That's a shame, I was really hoping for component/RGB support. I still don't get why the digital signal can't be converted into anything else besides composite, unless the digital signal already contains a merged chroma/luma. Once the project is finalized we'll hopefully be able to see a write-up of how it all works

 

[ClancyDaEnlightened]

That's a shame, I was really hoping for component/RGB support. I still don't get why the digital signal can't be converted into anything else besides composite, unless the digital signal already contains a merged chroma/luma. Once the project is finalized we'll hopefully be able to see a write-up of how it all works

I would assume the hardware is a dac (digital to analog converter) the soc probably has some extra hardware which would allow composite to be generated in software, probably some bit banging, the dac simply takes the digital (composite) and converts it to an analog signal that a tv decoder can understand, you can use bunch of resistors, however using a dac chip provides the best quality output wise, since it's buffered and cleaned a bit before heading out



If you can generate composite, you should also be able to do svideo

 

[The Real Jdbye]

View attachment 248431 View attachment 248433
View attachment 248434
Well every lcd tv Ive had, had composite, rf, dvi sometimes, usually youll get vga

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

Thought Mitsubishi made cars.....

View attachment 248435 View attachment 248436

Looks like an older model.

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.

The WIi still looks just as low res with composite. There's just noise added on top of all that like an overlay.

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.

That seems to be the way to go anyway, especially now that you have affordable upscalers like RetroTink. Better quality and lower latency

 

[godreborn]

I like @aadz93 , but I think it's just not the reality of things especially now. most things don't come with anything but hdmi out now like the nvidia shield, my dvr, etc.

 

[ClancyDaEnlightened]

I can go to my Walmart right now and get an lcd hdtv that has rf and composite, under $150


And there's always buying them online instead


Plus both 4k (smart) tvs are less than 5 years old, one is 42inch the other 60 iirc

 

[Deleted member 323844]

Nitehack has shown a video of the capture card through a 3€ composite2hdmi upscaler and 10€ USB 2.0 capture card.

He has confirmed as well that the screen/modes are a SOC's hardcoded feature. So the modes shown in the previous tweet are the only available, and TV output was definitely a thing back in the day.

 

[MetoMeto]

?

Snes and megadrive had rgb in 1990. 2006 doesn't fly as an excuse for composite.

Sega used VGA on dreamcast in 1999

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I can go to my Walmart right now and get an lcd hdtv that has rf and composite, under $150


And there's always buying them online instead


Plus both 4k (smart) tvs are less than 5 years old, one is 42inch the other 60 iirc

do you guys have anything thats not wallmart, ebay, mc donalds? i mean do you have something that local people like you and me own, like small stores to buy tech and burgers?

I mean im curious, cause i always her wallmart, mc donalds, ebay and other BIG chains but never "local electronic store" or something...

 

[FAST6191]

do you guys have anything thats not wallmart, ebay, mc donalds? i mean do you have something that local people like you and me own, like small stores to buy tech and burgers?

I mean im curious, cause i always her wallmart, mc donalds, ebay and other BIG chains but never "local electronic store" or something...

For the most part no, not really. I have been going there (various states though mostly western) on and off since the 80s and usually staying for months at a time. The rise of malls more or less killed off the main street thing that other places in the world kept along with until somewhat recently, and catalogue shopping prior to that was none too kind to them either (though it is a model that makes sense there with everything being spread out and prior to phones and internet then hard to reach as well), now internet came for both of them and the big shops (walmart = asda, literally actually as they own asda these days, but with more non food items). Similarly the rise of suburbia where nothing so gauche as a shop ought to be seen in such a place (pick a place with a reasonable population on maps and see how far shops might actually be) means you are travelling and at that point the malls/retail parks have you.
Non chain/franchise restaurants do exist but where chains are usually the exception in Europe then not so much in the US, though it is changing slowly (much to the chagrin of the chains -- see "millennials are killing chain restaurants").

You get thrift shops (think charity shops but they were doing ebay prices decades back) even if a lot of those are chains. Local shops do exist though they are usually service based (insurance, real estate, legal, finance, dentistry, vets... you know the game), speciality (import food and the like), vanity (rich guy funds his wife's fancy clothes/books/bakery/antiques type deal so that it at least does not lose too much money) and maybe local repair shop that has a few things that customers did not pick up or they took as part exchange.

It is quite odd to go shopping in such places, though it does mean you get skip the chains after you do them once or twice and seek other things.

 

[ClancyDaEnlightened]

More tech write up on how this actually works

https://hackaday.com/2021/02/28/hidden-tv-out-on-the-nintendo-ds-lite/



Technical write up on how this works

 

[Deleted member 323844]

The custom firmware for the DS TV OUT project is almost finished

— Pedro (@pedro_javierf) March 2, 2021

 

[FAST6191]

Hmm. Do I have to polish off the toothpick covered in tin foil?

 

[Deleted member 323844]

🔥Custom firmware for NDS TV Out finished 🔥 (no need to press the key combination neither open the homebrew for enable) @pedro_javierf @FNouwt @LostNintendoHt pic.twitter.com/iBXfINiyeQ

— Nitehack (@Nitehack) March 7, 2021

Unfortunately they won't sell the board, at least for now.

At the moment we have no intention of selling. You can build yourself or ask someone to build it for you, everything you need is in our repo https://t.co/lO3gYgRxsx

— Nitehack (@Nitehack) March 8, 2021

 

[Deleted member 323844]

There will be an stream Saturday 13 22:00 GTM.

To wrap up this week for the NDS-TV-OUT project, we'll be streaming the installation process, chatting and Q&A on Saturday 13 at 22:00 GMT+1 (4pm EST) at https://t.co/g5dJaFT6SL 👈🔥 tune in, we'll discuss the upcoming CFW and talk about the project

— LostNintendoHistory (@LostNintendoHt) March 10, 2021

And they will finally produce the board.

 

[Deleted User]

https://twitter.com/Nitehack/status/1368695060548771841

Unfortunately they won't sell the board, at least for now.

https://twitter.com/Nitehack/status/1368811134564904961

i missed this sort of thing, these days it seems everyone does anything for the money, you never see people making stuff just because they enjoy making stuff

 

[Deleted member 323844]

Metroid Prime Hunters looks pretty in TV . NDS TV OUT #ndstvout pic.twitter.com/DWT951wF4R

— Nitehack (@Nitehack) March 11, 2021

 

[Deleted member 323844]

I finally got a Rhotronix v2.1 board and tested some games.



Surprisingly clean quality, but I have used a RetroTINK-5X Pro, the best upscaler in the market, so idk how well it would perform with a lower quality upscaler or directly with some composite capture cards.