Teased earlier this week by the hacking group Lost Nintendo History was a homebrew release that would add TV-out to the Nintendo DS Lite, through the use of CFW and an open hardware circuit board. Today, the team managed to deliver on their promises by uploading their release on GitHub, as well as writing up an explanation of their process on their website. According to them, they'd found out that there was a TV-out feature leftover in the DS Lite's SoC, and that with some effort, they would be able to restore the function, allowing anyone to output their DS on their TV without having to resort to extra "bulky or cumbersome hardware" to do so.

Available only and specifically on the DS Lite, the method involves the custom firmware flashME, which reenables the TV-Out feature normally disabled on boot. Twilight Menu and a DS flashcart are also used, in order to boot the NDS_TV_OUT_ENABLE.nds file. Finally, you'll need a circuit board, of which the schematics, gerber file, and finer details are provided in the GitHub release. All of these things combined allow for you to play your DS Lite on your TV, with audio. You can output one screen at a time, and switch between the top or bottom with a single press of a switch on the circuit board. An installation guide and writeup are available on the project's GitHub, linked below.

On December 2020, we discovered that the Nintendo DS Lite's SoC (System on Chip) had a hidden feature: a leftover TV(Television) composite video output signal. This project contains our hardware designs and software code to restore this hidden feature and make it usable again. More details here

Contents

• Schematics & design & BOM
  • Can be found in this respository under /pcb
• Production Files
  • Gerber files are available in the releases page
• Documentation
  • Some base explaination of how the system works, how the PCB and software act altogether, etc. can be found here after the Installation section
• Tutorials
  • For a quick installation/usage tutorial, click here
  • Video Tutorial coming later this month

Acknowledgements
This project wouldn't be possible without the contributions of Gericom, Nitehack and pedro-javierf.

Source
Download Link

 

[raxadian]

So here is were they got the terrible idea for the Wii U.

 

[nolimits59]

The nds max res is 256x192 4:3; do you really need hdmi for this...s-video or rgb would be really all you need

Yeah, we live in an era where TVs won't have any analogic signal inputs like SCART or s-video... what an odd statement to say that it doesnt need HDMI...

 

[godreborn]

that is true. when I went to best buy, all tvs had hdmi only. I managed to get one with component and vga from video revolution. my receiver can up convert composite to component and my framemeister can convert component to hdmi.

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I still have composite left from when I had the normal retron 3:

 

[VootCaboot]

I'm fairly certain that RocketRobz has a pact with a god beyond this realm, as the work that they and the TWL++ team put out these days is nothing short of incredible.

 

[SS4]

For those who are still confused what the difference is . . .
Composite:

RGB:

S-Video

More images to compare if you click the actual link btw.

 

[raxadian]

I still have a CTR TV to play games on my old video game consoles.

 

[Kwyjor]

I can hardly believe that in seventeen years none of the hackers in China or Hong Kong managed to puzzle this out. There would have been boatloads of cash to be made.

I remember some people were selling one bulky device that practically amounted to a camera that you mounted on the face of the upper screen. Does anyone else remember that?

Devkits have extra hardware and are more powerful than their retail counterpart, effectively a more pc spec version of the console, more ram, extra cpu power, and hardware specific to software engineers

The story goes that The Simpsons Hit & Run was developed on a PS2 dev unit and the developers had to scale everything down at the last minute when they realized how much less powerful the retail units were.

 

[zfreeman]

I remember some people were selling one bulky device that practically amounted to a camera that you mounted on the face of the upper screen.

http://hight3ch.com/nintendo-ds-playable-on-tv/amp/

 

[Retinal_FAILURE]

Cool, but also ewww composite.

of course this would look amazing on a PVM through composite and any commercially available CRT ever. Long live the CRT!




I just looked at the last couple of comments after 8 minutes of this post. May delete in the future if I feel the need to make it to Level 5.

 

[Deleted member 323844]

Such low resolution over composite won't be pretty, I'm used to Nokia phones TV output (240x320) and it's borderline watchable. But if the board gets simpler and easier to install I think I will give it a go.

 

[Foxi4]

I don't know why people are worried about Composite so much, the standard is perfectly adequate for sending PAL/NTSC signal which far exceeds the resolution of the DS. I *still* use Composite regularly on my Orange Pi with no issues whatsoever, it's a matter of shielding your wiring properly.

 

[SG854]

For those who are still confused what the difference is . . .
Composite:

RGB:

S-Video

More images to compare if you click the actual link btw.

S-Video looks really good almost on par with RGB

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I don't know why people are worried about Composite so much, the standard is perfectly adequate for sending PAL/NTSC signal which far exceeds the resolution of the DS. I *still* use Composite regularly on my Orange Pi with no issues whatsoever, it's a matter of shielding your wiring properly.

Lots of people don't like picture quality of composite. The case can be made for older consoles through composite on a old tube display for all the dithering and transparency effects. But DS wasn't made for Old TV so people want the best picture for the DS. Maybe some comb filtering can make it look a little bit better.

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of course this would look amazing on a PVM through composite and any commercially available CRT ever. Long live the CRT!




I just looked at the last couple of comments after 8 minutes of this post. May delete in the future if I feel the need to make it to Level 5.

Its that motion clarity that not even oleds can match with the exception of maybe the LG CX Oled with black frame insertion.

Some PVM models have a really nice comb filtering so it makes it look a little better. But some models don't so composite looks like crap.

 

[ov3rkill]

Leave it to the homebrew community to make the legacy consoles complete and that includes the accessory port for the PS Vita too. These news are totally newsworthy.

 

[zxr750j]

I do have a flashme with programmer somewhere, good old days

 

[Jokey_Carrot]

I don't know why people are worried about Composite so much, the standard is perfectly adequate for sending PAL/NTSC signal which far exceeds the resolution of the DS. I *still* use Composite regularly on my Orange Pi with no issues whatsoever, it's a matter of shielding your wiring properly.

It looks like shit. No matter how good your cables are you're still not going to get a good picture.

 

[BaamAlex]

I already got one, it's called a Wii U.

But the wii u is a flop.

 

[Retinal_FAILURE]

But the wii u is a flop.

Not for the hacking environment.

 

[Ryccardo]

Yeah, we live in an era where TVs won't have any analogic signal inputs like SCART or s-video... what an odd statement to say that it doesnt need HDMI...

That's because you were duped by consumism to buy drm-friendly unrepairable plastic screens with no soul

 

[Foxi4]

It looks like shit. No matter how good your cables are you're still not going to get a good picture.

The DS is 256x192 per screen. If you expect it to *not* look like shit after you blow it up to 1080p/4K with the garbage internal scaler in your TV, I have a bridge to sell you. If you want to go through some extra shenanigans I'm sure you can split the signal into RGB and use SCART instead - I personally never had any trouble with Composite unless the shielding was inadequate. Then again, I also grew up on a 20 inch CRT TV with a mono speaker playing NES games, so maybe my requirements in terms of picture quality aren't as extravagant.

 

[StrayGuitarist]

RGB has been in game consoles since the early 90s and In computers since like the mid 80s.

That's true, but most people weren't using it in 2004. Most people would just hook up their spiffy new PS2 or Xbox to a CRT, or, if they were really well off, some plasma screen or projection TV that hits 720p at best.