E-Reader For Nintendo DS

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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.

16 thoughts on “E-Reader For Nintendo DS

  1. 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.

  2. 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 :)

  3. 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.

  4. 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 ;)

  5. 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.

  6. 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

  7. 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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