e-Reader for Nintendo DS

posted Jan 20th 2006 11:00am by
filed under: ds hacks, gameboy hacks, nintendo hacks

7ds

The e-Reader is an add-on product for the Nintendo Game Boy Advance. It has a simple optical card swipe for loading programs off of specially encoded cards. The location of the link port adapter keeps the device from being used with the Nintendo DS. Reader [Caitsith2] has posted instructions for modifying the reader for use with the DS. If you don’t plan on using it with your GBA you can pull the entire board. Once you’ve got the e-Reader switched you can do fun stuff like printing out your own homebrew e-Reader cards.

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16 Responses to e-Reader for Nintendo DS

  • matt says:
    January 20, 2006 at 11:12 am

    i wasn’t aware of e-reader homebrew, but seeing it and the mod to make it fit my ds makes me want to start modding

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  • Caitsith2 says:
    January 20, 2006 at 1:45 pm

    Don’t forget that there is also homebrew dotcodes available at http://www.caitsith2.com/ereader/index.htm under the save section.

    Reply Report comment
  • danadamkof says:
    January 20, 2006 at 8:44 pm

    Sweet hack!! I always wanted to try this but I only have a DS; e-Readers are really cheap used at GameStop, so I may well try this out.

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  • TJ says:
    January 20, 2006 at 9:00 pm

    Interesting, I was pretty sure this was 2006, not 2004.

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  • alex says:
    January 21, 2006 at 12:40 am

    that ’7′ near the upper lefthand corner of the picture is really taunting me…

    Reply Report comment
  • Caitsith2 says:
    January 21, 2006 at 4:25 am

    danadamkof: The nintendo ds is completely compatible with gba related things, since the gba archetecture is built into the ds cpu. the only thing not included in the ds cpu is the gbc/dmg cpus. (would have costed more to maintain full backwards compatibility.)

    The original japanese ereader, which doesn’t have the link port, is the only one that needs no modification whatsoever to work with the nintendo ds system. The japanese ereader plus is just a port of the us ereader, and as such, has the same link port passthrough, and as a result, needs to be modified for ds use.

    In the absolute worst case, where you don’t have any means whatsoever to open your ereader, and you don’t mind not being able to use the link port connection on the original gba (the kind that needed an afterburner kit to have decent lighting), you can just cut/grind the link port connector off altogether, as it is just a passthrough.

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  • Mr dan says:
    January 21, 2006 at 4:36 am

    Is there any way to connect a DS to a GBA(SP) in order to play multiplayer games (GBA ones)?

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  • danadamkof says:
    January 21, 2006 at 7:09 pm

    Oh, I know full well that GBA stuff works on the DS, but I had just plain accepted that I’d never be use an e-Reader on it. Not any more!

    In fact, I was playing some king of fighters EX 2 on my DS earlier today (living up to my screen name I guess :)

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  • danadamkof says:
    January 21, 2006 at 7:11 pm

    Looking at my first comment, I can see that I did word it a bit confusingly. My bad.

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  • uplink12 says:
    January 23, 2006 at 1:15 pm

    Amz!!!

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  • Brian says:
    March 1, 2006 at 7:39 pm

    I would take my e-reader apart to put it in my ds, but I still might use it to get those things for mario 3. The link probably won’t work anymore if I did that, so I’m just going to use it in my gba player or gba.

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  • swimgod says:
    March 26, 2006 at 3:45 am

    hey,
    i was the first one to think of this hack :P
    but i had a better way,
    you can remove the port extender with a screw driver, so your E-reader doesn’t get messed up at all :D

    anyway glad to see someone else realize this works ;)

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  • Celia Finsel says:
    July 2, 2006 at 10:20 am

    There’s another simpler hack for this that requires less disassembly of the e-reader. Because the port extender is just a *little* too long to allow the e-reader to fit in the DS, you can take off the back cover to the unit, leave the optical assembly attached but gently flip up its circuit board and remove the two screws holding the port extension. You don’t really need to do anything more. Leave the port assembly in, put the optical card back down, and put the back on again and the port assembly will slide back just enough to let the e-reader work in the DS just fine. Just did it with my son’s unit, works like a charm, took about 2 minutes, tops. No power tools needed, less mucking about with the innards, and all essential parts still in place.

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  • fat cat says:
    July 19, 2006 at 9:47 pm

    I tried it out and It’s awsome. It’s graphics are a lot better on DS And I don’t know why.

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  • theceng says:
    July 28, 2006 at 7:04 am

    i was just wondering how to connect the e-reader between 2 GBA’s. I tried but i couldn’t figure out how to connect it to the pokemon ruby/sapphire versions in order to scan pokemon from cards onto the e-reader and then transfer it to the pokemon game. If anyone knows how to do this please email at theceng@hotmail.com

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  • nupanick says:
    September 19, 2008 at 2:30 pm

    I can’t get the custom cards to work, I printed them onto index cards at maximum resolution after shrinking them with firefly’s program. I’m not sure if it’s related, but I compared it to an actual e-reader card and I think it’s a little bit too big at 1200 dpi… does anyone know how to stop getting “read error” every time? Or have a PDF of the cards at the right size?

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