Did Nintendo ever create a way to get DS games on the TV?

[neorichieb1971]

I just bid on a DS. Never had a Nintendo handheld before. I have one game "Mr Driller Spirits" I bought on here years ago but never played. The Bubble Bobble Revolutions pack looks refreshing (Didn't know it existed until clicking on random videos).

But can I play them on the big screen?

[Hoagtech]

Sort of. You can play through your capture device if you install a capture board.

It's not playable imo because of the latency but would be cool for some of the unique turned based rpgs like dq9.

[blizzz]

The Wii U has official VC emulators for DS games. With homebrew you can probably inject your own games.

[Ikaruga11]

Not with physical cartridges, no.

You can through emulation on the Wii U though, officially or unofficially.

[Xer Xian]

There's no commercially available product, but if you're absolutely dying to play DS cartiridges on a big screen there's the ugly, unwieldy and oddly-named 'is-nitro-capture' device. It pops up on eBay sometimes.

[mvsfan]

now that theyve been through a few generations of the ds they should bring out a New 3ds Player that can play all the ds games.

[FinalBaton]

There's no commercially available product, but if you're absolutely dying to play DS cartiridges on a big screen there's the ugly, unwieldy and oddly-named 'is-nitro-capture' device. It pops up on eBay sometimes.

wish somebody would reverse-engineer this thing and clone it. That's be dope

[ZellSF]

If you're going to use one of those expensive capture card mods anyway you might as well get a 3DS modded with a capture card.

The easy and cheap solution would be to just use PC emulators and flash carts on your DS/3DS to transfer saves.

Only official and approved way is the Wii U's virtual console which is limited to 31 titles. None of them which are particularly good either.

[Guspaz]

I don't really understand why there aren't any HDMI mods available, considering how expensive and complex the boards for the USB mods are (as in there doesn't seem to be an advantage in cost/complexity by using USB over HDMI). That said, there are only two people doing the mods, and they have very shady business practices (Want to use it without a PC? $200 for a raspberry Pi with my software on it. Lose your software key? Pay me again to use your 3DS. Want to buy the hardware and install it yourself? I produce extremely small quantities and refuse to let anybody but me install them to keep prices sky high.)

The mods don't seem to be very complex to install, their insane prices and shady practices just seem to be about extracting the most money from people.

[neorichieb1971]

Could someone mod a DS to use the gamecube adapter cable?

[ZellSF]

Could someone mod a DS to use the gamecube adapter cable?

The only "Gamecube adapter cable" that could possibly (unlikely) be modded to use on a DS is the GBA cable that allows you to use a GBA controller on a Gamecube. If that's what you want you can pick up used GBA for practically nothing.

If you're talking about how people play GBA games on a TV via a Gamecube (Gameboy Player), that's not a cable, but a separate box that's basically a GBA with TV output over a special connector on the Gamecube. To mod a DS to do that you would have to have a complex hardware mod on the DS, plus the software support on the Gamecube side. Possible? Probably. But it's never going to happen. Mostly because it would be pointless: hacking in video out on the DS is more sensible than using a Gamecube as middle man.

[Einzelherz]

No, they didn't want to sell tons of Wii Us.

[DoomsDave]

I'll never understand why Nintendo didn't release a DS/3DS player for Wii U. Seems like the only chance we will ever get to play legit console ports.

[BuckoA51]

I grabbed a Katsukitty 3DS with capture kit installed and reviewed it recently - https://www.videogameperfection.com/201 ... re-review/

The TL:DR version would be that it's cool, but kinda clunky (since you have to run it through PC).

A lot of DS/3DS games just aren't suitable for playing on the big screen, and of course blowing them up that big does them no favours. Even with the Wii-U gamepad a lot of games just wouldn't work, though a lot would of course, so I have to agree this is kinda a missed opportunity. Maybe if the Wii-U had actually sold better.

With the capture kits you obviously can't use an external controller either.

DS and 3DS emulators are okay but far from perfect, especially 3DS ones.

[ZellSF]

I'll never understand why Nintendo didn't release a DS/3DS player for Wii U.

Uh, they would rather sell you the games again on Virtual Console than just let you play cartridges you bought ages ago. It's not that complicated to understand.

[DoomsDave]

I get that but it doesn't ring true when they release a handful of games digitally. They still sell 3DS carts as well.

[Einzelherz]

Based on retro stores stocks Nintendo sold roughly a bajillion super gameboys. I'm sure it helped sell gameboy games, too.

[ZellSF]

I get that but it doesn't ring true when they release a handful of games digitally. They still sell 3DS carts as well.

Lack of resources. If they had the resources to invest into a hardware compatibility device, they would rather use it for virtual console since there's more money in that.

There's even more money in limited collector's items though, so they don't have resources to invest into virtual console either.

[Woozle]

I don't really understand why there aren't any HDMI mods available, considering how expensive and complex the boards for the USB mods are (as in there doesn't seem to be an advantage in cost/complexity by using USB over HDMI). That said, there are only two people doing the mods, and they have very shady business practices (Want to use it without a PC? $200 for a raspberry Pi with my software on it. Lose your software key? Pay me again to use your 3DS. Want to buy the hardware and install it yourself? I produce extremely small quantities and refuse to let anybody but me install them to keep prices sky high.)

The mods don't seem to be very complex to install, their insane prices and shady practices just seem to be about extracting the most money from people.

I think it's due to a few things. I'm not sure what the hsync frequency is on the 3DS but it probably wouldn't play nicely with a basic line doubler. So you would need a good bit of memory to buffer the image from the top display (what about the bottom?). Then there's replacing the touchscreen, unless you're ok with holding a franken-DS to use its lower half for a controller/touch screen.

The video ribbon connectors on the 3DS are fine pitch and if I remember correctly, use some staggered/offset pin setup on the flex cable. Maybe an off the shelf cable could be used, but idk. Seems like soldering up a prototype would be a pain in the ass compared to existing hdmi kits.

Forgetting the controller/touchscreen aspect, you really just need an fpga with enough memory. The Artix7 series would probably work, Artix7 bga chips can probably work on a cheap 4 layer board.

I'm sure an hdmi kit will pop up one of these days, I just hope it's soon.

[Guspaz]

The existing 3DS capture boards (which look like they're ~4 sq in) are FPGA-based, and they're charging $200-250 USD for them depending on if it's katsukitty or loopy. Could you really not fit a memory controller and sdram chip (or an FPGA with built-in memory) in that price ballpark?

In terms of controls, people usually pair these sorts of mods with controller mods. Many DS/3DS games require only minimal interaction with the touchscreen, so they end up playing primarily with a controller and touching the screen only as required.

In terms of the display ribbon cable, neither of the mods (for the original 3DS anyhow) use that. They both solder to rather large test points on the 3DS motherboard. You line up a flat flex cable and solder through vias on the flat flex to the big test points on the board. It doesn't appear to require much soldering skill. There are still how-to guides and videos available from back when they used to actually allow self-installation (katsukitty no longer does, loopy has been sold out for... months, years?)

The FPGA used by the loopy board is a Spartan 6, looks like model number XC6SLX9-CS62258IV1309 (no search results for that so I may have a character wrong). That whole product line seems to be in the $30-40 range, and they're handling both screens sent out over USB. I know HDMI encoders can be had super cheaply, so isn't all you're really missing enough memory for a framebuffer?



Soldering down this flat flex appears to represent all the electronics-related installation (the rest is physical stuff like cutting holes):

[Woozle]

I'm using a very similar FPGA for my GBA HDMI board. It can do 720p HDMI directly from it's IO, I guess the lack of memory (or desire to make it) is why they went with USB.

If you only cared about the top screen, a $50 Artix7 XC7A50T would do the job. You might even be able to get by with the $35 XC7A35T. Both can do 720p HDMI right from the chip, and I think 1080p with a little overclocking. While those might seem like expensive FPGA options, it would make board design simple due to not needing external SRAM or an HDMI transmitter. Would probably have spare pins for a VGA/RGB output.

Are custom flex cables expensive? Is is possible to buy just that cable?

[Guspaz]

Consider that the boards go for $200-250 and they charge $500 for a pre-modded system (3DS normally sell for $99), there seems to be a lot of price room to spend an extra $20 on the FPGA for a consolized 3DS.

You'd probably want to do both screens, though. A fair number of DS/3DS games put important stuff (sometimes even all the gameplay) on the bottom screen.

They don't even sell the boards standalone, let alone the flex cable. I've no idea about the cost of manufacturing flex cables, but BadAssConsoles has had a real nightmare getting custom ones made. Marshall (UltraHDMI) on the other hand doesn't seem to have had as much trouble.

Kind of ironic that there has been so much attention on HDMI mods for something like the N64 (33 million units sold) and the GameCube (22 million units sold) but nobody has done work towards an HDMI mod for the DS/3DS (220 million units sold).

[Woozle]

Any idea how many bits per pixel the 3DS uses? If it's 15-bit like the GBA, you would have enough room to buffer a full frame top/bottom on the Artix7 50t.

I actually have a schematic drawn out for a XC7A50T board, layout is started but still needs a good bit of work. I've just held back from finishing it because I didn't like the thought of frying a $50 BGA chip in my homemade reflow oven. I'll work on it today and see if I can get it far enough to order a set of 3 from oshpark.

To get around the custom flex cable for now, I could do a 40 pin flex cable from FPGA board to a small little pcb that breaks it out to solder pads. Then solder the 3DS up to that.

[Extrems]

It's 24-bit, DS was 18-bit.

[Guspaz]

The top screen is 800x240 (although you could drop every other pixel since it will be pixel doubled in 2D mode), and the bottom screen is 320x240. They're 24bpp (the DS was 256x192x2 at 18bpp). You'd probably need to buffer a full 720p or 1080p image so as to allow reasonable scaling. The scaling is tricky because there are very few opportunities for integer scaling, and no opportunities with equal scaling on top/bottom screens.

Some scaling possibilities (not exhaustive)

720p: Stacked, 2x top, 1x bottom
720p: Stacked, 1x top, 2x bottom
720p: Stacked, 1.5x top, 1.5x bottom
720p: Side-by-side, 2.0x top, 1.5x bottom
720p: Side-by-side, 1.6x top, 2.0x bottom
720p: Side-by-side, ~1.78x top, ~1.78x bottom
720p: Rotate stack, 1.8x top, 2.25x bottom (or just 2x bottom to keep it integer, or 1.8x bottom to keep consistent size)

1080p: Stacked: 3x top, 1.5x bottom
1080p: Stacked: 1.5x top, 3x bottom
1080p: Stacked: 2.25x top, 2.25x bottom
1080p: Side-by-side, 3.0x top, 2.25x bottom
1080p: Side-by-side, 2.4x top, 3.0x bottom
1080p: Side-by-side, ~2.67x top, ~2.67x bottom
1080p: Rotate stack, 2.7x top, 3.375x bottom

Of all these, the most likely scenario users would want is probably equal top/bottom screen (I'm guessing), and you've got enough pixels to produce a decently sharp scale (for example, a bilinear downscale from a 3x integer scale looks decent), although casual users would probably be fine with simple bilinear or bicubic scaling.

[Woozle]

At 24-bits/pixel, the 50t wouldn't be able to buffer a full frame from both the top/bottom screens. Maybe it would be possible to only buffer half a frame. The 50t is a 256 pin BGA, so if needed SRAM could be added.

From what I read, the Artix7 can do TMDS from the HR (high range) IO banks. Looking at it's IO bank layout, they all appear to be HR banks? Maybe someone could clarify that. Seems like there would be enough IO to drive two HDMI outputs, for a stacked monitor setup. That wouldn't work for TVs and would probably be a bit involved for a realistic setup.

A good single screen solution would be better overall. For games which don't use the bottom screen for active gameplay (just menus), you could swap between displaying the top/bottom.

It seems like a rotated method would require more than 1 frame to be buffered in order to avoid screen tearing.

Any ideas as for pixel data format (serial/parallel)?

[neorichieb1971]

Has this thread now turned into a 3DS mod thread?

I'm just interested in NDS games on the TV at the moment.

[bobrocks95]

Has this thread now turned into a 3DS mod thread?

I'm just interested in NDS games on the TV at the moment.

Since there's not really any solutions, looking into a 3DS HDMI mod may be your only option.

[Guspaz]

Has this thread now turned into a 3DS mod thread?

I'm just interested in NDS games on the TV at the moment.

The situation for the DS and 3DS is identical, only laggy USB capture cards are available, and any work to support DS games on a TV might as well target the 3DS since it supports both DS and 3DS games.

[Link83]

Loopy did have a HDMI version in development, but never released it:-
http://3dscapture.com/dev/index.html
It had two HDMI ports - one for each screen:-