Turning a Nintendo DS into a Gameboy Macro

Nov 13, 2024

Hallå pals!

Jonas here with another issue of Indie Notebook to get some ideas out of my noggin, and to inspire you to do the same.

Bit of a tangent today since it’s not art or directly game dev related. It’s just a new hobby I’m picking up, which does involve a bit of creativity, but maybe a bit more problem-solving.

Aside from replacing the joysticks on a couple of drifting Switch joycons, I’ve never done any modding. But this weekend I finished my first proper mod. I’m pretty happy with how it turned out!

Turning a Nintendo DS into a Gameboy Macro

A few years ago I bought a busted up old Nintendo DS to try and mod it into a “Gameboy Macro.” Basically what you do is you remove the top screen and then you only play Gameboy Advance games on it.

The mod isn’t too hard, but there are some tricky steps to it that intimated me.

The first tricky step is to solder a small resistor to the circuitboard to fool the console into thinking that the top screen is still there (otherwise the console will just die when you boot it up). My brother did that for me, cause we were both at our parents house in Sweden when I started this. And gosh dang I don’t think I could have pulled this off as a first mod without his help. That was some precise-fiddly stuff. I know I would have screwed that up.

This is what the console has looked like since he helped me out on it.

I left two cables poking out through the top. They are from one of the speakers that used to be inside the top part of the DS. The speaker didn’t fit inside what’s left after removing the top screen, so I just let the speaker hang out through a crevice in the shell and I stuffed the speaker inside the DS cartridge slot temporarily.

You could even see the circuit board through the pen hole here

Either way, this is what the console has looked like for a year or two. It’s been lying around forgotten in a drawer, functional, but unfinished.

I brought the console with me back home to France this summer cause I couldn’t find the time to finish it while visiting my family.

And that brings me to why I hesitated for so long to finish this mod. I had to desolder the speaker and insert a new one. There were two problems with this, 1) I don’t have a soldering iron, 2) I never soldered anything in my life.

So I ordered a soldering iron. And a heap of other tools, materials and some new parts.

Desoldering the speaker was very easy. But putting in the new one was not as easy. The wire I ordered is very thin and fragile, and the contact points on the circuit board are tiiiny. I didn’t time myself but I think I tried for about 2 hours to get them in there. I thought I got it right by the end but once I reassembled everything I couldn’t hear any sound from it. Maybe one of the wires broke somewhere? It’s also just as likely that my soldering wasn’t good enough.

Except for that I was surprised by how smoothly it all went. Swapping the shell, replacing the screen, it’s not as difficult as it might seem. I even opened up the housing of a trigger button and cleaned some rust off of it (it’s incredible how tiny these things are).

This is how the console turned out in the end. The screen looks much sharper in real life, it was hard to capture.

If you look closely between the D-pad and the orange cable, you can even see the little resistor that my brother helped me solder to the circuitboard. It’s the tall, blue, little blob with stripes on it.

It even looks cool from the back and I like that the transparent shell makes it easy to see which game is in there.

I’ve been playing a bit of Dragon Ball Z: Supersonic Warriors on it and Zelda Minish Cap, and it works really well! Except for the audio missing ofc, but the headphone jack works so it’s not a big deal. I think I will do another attempt at soldering that speaker some day in the future when I’ve practiced more on easier projects.

I’d love to mod some more consoles and maybe do some Arduino/Raspberry projects. I was planning to make an alarm clock with a friend, we’ll see if that happens. :- )

If you have any game recommendations for GBA I would be keen to hear them! Some of the games I’m looking for already are: Mr Driller, Advance Wars, Tetris, DK King of Swing and Astroboy.

Mini Notes

🪛 Modder - Obirux

This is one of my favorite modders out there. He made a bunch of Gameboy Macro mods and is quite a perfectionist. He even prints his own stickers to put on the back of the consoles. Seeing his mods was part of the reason I got inspired to try this myself.

🎮 Game - Goodboy Galaxy

This is a modern game developed for the Gameboy Advance. I’d love to buy a physical copy of it, but right now it seems like the only way is to put it on an R4 card. Luckily I can do that since I have the DS cartridge slot on my Macro.

Oh, and there are even publishers specializing in releasing brand new games for the GBA. That’s so wild to me, I love that this is happening.

📝 Essay - Tech could be lovelier

I need to give it some more time and thought, but I think I could write a followup essay to this, related to modding.

📝 Essay - Computers are still babies

And speaking of “tech could be lovelier,” there’s also this very first blog post/essay I ever wrote and published on my blog. It’s about my dream of making a computer/tech company. Maybe this is one of the first baby steps towards something like that? I don’t expect that though, I’m just having fun with this.