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I was nervous and had shaky hands, but with patience (don’t rush!), I successfully pulled through. When I initially attempted this mod, it was only my third time holding a soldering iron. While soldering might be tricky, it should be easy enough for beginners to handle. If you were to bridge two pads with solder, that could cause a short, so be careful and keep steady. The resistor is smaller than a grain of rice and there are a dangerous number of solder pads in a very small area. It’s also the hardest step in the whole process.
#NDS GAMEBOY MACRO SHELL MOD#
The most crucial step for this mod is soldering the resistor, which allows the spliced DS Lite to boot without the top screen. If you know your way around a solder joint, you can probably finish the entire mod in under an hour. Keep calm and solder onįor first-time modders, this mod could take as long as two hours to complete. You’ll want to have an X-Acto knife since you’ll have to do some light cutting. For $10 more, you can get the glass screen with a “Game Boy Macro” logo, which I didn’t buy because the font turned me off. At $54, the shell is pricey, but so worth it. Touches like the recessed D-pad and button areas give the modded handheld a more polished feel, and it covers up the X and Y buttons for a cleaner look and more authentic Game Boy Advance layout. It only replaces the surface of the bottom half of the DS Lite, but it makes subtle improvements to the ergonomics and aesthetics. To pretty up your Game Boy Macro and house the new speaker, get Boxy Pixel’s sublime CNC machined aluminum housing shell. The Boxy Pixel shell only replaces the top half of the DS lite housing.
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#NDS GAMEBOY MACRO SHELL MODS#
It’s still sort of pricey, but worthwhile hardware mods aren’t cheap - this project is definitely worth splurging. You could cut costs and get the budget down to under $100 by doing without components like the new shell or speaker, or go with a cheaper knockoff toolkit like this one that Input Senior Reviews Editor Raymond Wong recommends, but the finished result may be a less complete Game Boy Macro. If you’re starting from scratch with no DS Lite, components, or tools, the cost for this mod could be as much as $200. I used a busted DS Lite that I’ve had since 2010 and I recommend you do so, too, if you can instead of tearing apart a perfectly functional DS Lite. Total budget: I spent a total of about $150 on this project for all of the parts and tools.
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Twenty years ago in 2001, Nintendo changed everything with the release of the Game Boy Advance.
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