The original DS was so ugly I was sad when I first took it out of the box. Just look at it, What made it worst is that I imported mine for the US.

I was so happy when they released the Nintendo DS lite but with it bought all sorts of problems. The hinge was a major bug bearer and soon many DS was left looking like this. This is one I bought off eBay, as you can see the top screen has totally been ripped off the bottom. Kids these days

If you have one with a broken hinge or one that wont turn on then I’m going to show how to turn it into a Gameboy Advance. First things first you will need to strip down your DS or in our case you will just need to strip the bottom half down so follow this ifixit guild.

Once your DS is striped down you will need to looks for the 2 pads on the left of the screen side shown the photo below and bridge them with ether an resistor or a LED, any size resistor will do we just need to trick the DS into thinking that the top screen is still connected. If you are going to use a LED then you will need to attach the positive leg to the top pad and the negative leg to the bottom pad as shown in the picture.

Here’s it with a lovely blue LED. Be warned that the LED is very distracting and blinding.

Also can use a resistor (330 ohm) if you don’t fancy getting distracted/blinded by a LED

You will need a fine pointed tip soldering iron because these pads are really small but just take your time and you will fine. Here’s a video of me soldering my DS

You will lose your all the functionality of the DS such as the speakers but you can just use headphones. weirdly enough you can still get it to load a ds game but without the top screen its not much use. I’m not sure how this affects battery life but im sure that it will extend it with only powering one screen. The major upside to this mod it that you get a backlit Gameboy Advanced for much less than buying a Gameboy Advance micro

I mentioned that you can still boot DS games but I found that I couldn’t get  my R4 card to boot. I’ve got a ezflash v card which is a Gameboy Adance flash card which you use the r4 to flash/load games onto it but without begin able to load the r4 card I can’t. not sure if other cards would work or it could be the hack that the r4 card is using to boot who knows.

I wanted to see what you could do other than play Gameboy Advance games on this bad boy. I found a Gameboy Colour emulator because as you know the DS can’t play Gameboy games. Download the emulator here

Also while I was looking I found a NES emulator which was kinda cool. You can download that here