Fix A Broken DS By Removing A Screen

There are apparently a lot of broken Nintendo DS Lites out and about on eBay, and [Fede] has gotten his hands on one. His idea was to essentially turn one of these DS Lites into a SS (single screen?) (.es, Google translate) by modding the case, and he’s done it with pretty spectacular results.

If you’re going to do a case mod, you should go all out. To that end, [Fede] started by taking everything out of the DS and tossing the original 1000 mAh battery in favor of a 4000 mAh battery. From there he is able to shoehorn the two PCBs into the case with the speaker in between, which he notes doesn’t sound as nice as the original but works well enough.

After reshaping the plastic case in a few subtle ways and putting a few layers of paint on it, [Fede] now has a single-screen Nintendo DS for €2 plus parts and paint. While we’ve seen similar mods before, we’d be interested to see this one in action; some DS games don’t utilize the second screen as much as others, so perhaps this wouldn’t play every DS game perfectly, but for the price it can’t be beat.

8 thoughts on “Fix A Broken DS By Removing A Screen

  1. Why not just restore it to original? My daughter’s DSi took a header down the stairs and I was able to replace both screens and a torn ribbon cable for less than $25 worth of eBay parts.

  2. Great craftsmanship on this. I did something very similar with the original DS console, Pulled the wifi antenna down into the main body but don’t recall bringing the speaker along.. pretty sure that’s why it got almost no use. At this point it was a fancy GBA you have to use headphones on.

    One thing interesting to note is I had to trick it into ‘sensing’ there was a top screen via a high value resistor otherwise the Power LED will turn on then shut back off, I chose the highest value it would boot with and it always turned on reliably.

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