I'm just reporting that another of my Chinese-to-English mods retaining the original resistor just stopped working recently (stuck in Japanese mode; originally Chinese). Just like before, the solder job looked very good. That's two now, so I wouldn't trust it without a wire (I've modded five and only kept the resistor in about three of them).
I have a stange problem to report with the M3 DS real. Mine hangs on a black screen after displaying the logo in some DSes, but works fine in others. Whats more, it seems to go through long cycles of not working in those specific DSes and then just "start working" for a little while. It's so confusing, that the only way to understand is to just document the entire experience:
My first M3 DS real stopped working in my nephew's "phat" DS. It still worked on mine, and I had just fixed a ribbon cable and replacement housing on his DS, so I assumed that it was his DS at fault (I discovered at the same time that the L button no longer worked XD). I tried it many times in the following weeks and it always worked in mine and not in his... until last weekend. It just suddenly worked and worked for days. When it first happened, his DS locked on me while playing Starfox Command and then the M3r wouldn't boot, so I always suspected that it was an intermittant problem with the DS.
After it started working, I was at a friends house when my battery went dead in one of my DS lites (which it had ALWAYS worked in). I then tried it in my friend's Mario Kart DS phat and it behaved the same way as my nephew's DS phat (worked once, locked-up in-game, stopped booting), despite working 100% of the time in both of my DS lites (hundreds of play sessions in those weeks). Suspicious, I tried it in my nephew's DS phat again and, sure enough, it was no longer working in either DS phat though it continued working just fine in my two DS lites. After fiddling with it in the slot of my friend's DS phat, I could get it to boot some times and lock up, but no amount of fiddling had worked weeks earlier on my nephew's DS phat. Even so, eventually I couldn't get it to boot at all.
Even so, I was confident that I had isolated the problem to a DS phat "fit" problem... until I took it to work the following weekend and left it with a coworker overnight (my coworker's M3 DS real was the one with the malfunctioning region mod and I took it home to fix it). I had also left my white DS lite on charge with his charger because I couldn't find my charger. When I returned in the morning to relieve him (damned 12hr shifts!), he jokingly told me that my M3r "was racist" because it would only work in my white DS lite (he has a black one), which I had left overnight. I pulled my black DS lite out of my pocket and confirmed that it works with both of my DS lites but seemingly never works with his, just like the DS phats that it seemingly didn't work with for weeks. Swapping the mSD card to the second, now-repaired, M3r showed that the system files were fine and that the original card was at fault because this one worked in all DSes.
So there we have it. Problematic in three DSes (two phats and one lite), but it just happens to work fine in my two DS lites. WTF? I can't help but think that it works in mine ONLY for some strange reason.