IDE-GBAMP Hack Adds a Big Hard Drive to Your DS
There’s Datel‘s 4GB hard drive and media player that slots into the DS GBA port. But apparently someone wants more storage space hooked up to his DS. Like about ten times as much – 40GB worth. Imagine how many full-length DVD rips or lossless MP3s will fit in that baby.
One of natrium42‘s latest hardware projects involves hacking a laptop hard drive to the DS through a GBAMP cartridge. The result is definitely unwieldy and does nothing for portability, but it is a demonstration of how a traditional PC storage device could communicate with the DS through the GBA port. The idea for this came from the realization that CompactFlash cards use the same IDE interface as standard hard drives, and thus each IDE pin could be connected to its corresponding CF pin.
But this hack isn’t as straightforward as connecting the IDE-CF dots. Read on for more details (click on the Full Article link below).
There’s Datel‘s 4GB hard drive and media player that slots into the DS GBA port. But apparently someone wants more storage space hooked up to his DS. Like about ten times as much – 40GB worth. Imagine how many full-length DVD rips or lossless MP3s will fit in that baby.
One of natrium42‘s latest hardware projects involves hacking a laptop hard drive to the DS through a GBAMP cartridge. The result is definitely unwieldy and does nothing for portability, but it is a demonstration of how a traditional PC storage device could communicate with the DS through the GBA port. The idea for this came from the realization that CompactFlash cards use the same IDE interface as standard hard drives, and thus each IDE pin could be connected to its corresponding CF pin.
But this hack isn’t as straightforward as connecting the IDE-CF dots; natrium42 points out that the DS only pumps about 3.3 volts to the GBA slot, and that an external 5V power source was required. So natrium42 added an 11.1V LiPo (lithium-ion polymer) battery and a 5V DC-DC converter to provide the needed juice to the HDD. Both the battery and the converter are available at a local R/C aircraft shop.
Other required materials include the GBAMP card, a laptop/notebook HDD, a 2.5″ USB hard drive enclosure, and an 80-wire IDE “ribbon” cable. Plus a good soldering kit, some fast-drying epoxy glue, a good pair of needlenose pliers (really needle-nosed, you’ll be using this on the GBA’s contact pins), and a hobby knife.
What natrium42 did was to solder a connection between the GBAMP’s CF reader and the IDE hard drive connector (which is desoldered from the USB hard drive enclosure, as seen below). The GBAMP is disassembled, and each individual wire of the IDE ribbon cable is soldered to each CF pin. The GBAMP is reassembled (with a slot cut into the bottom for the IDE ribbon to feed through), and then the other end of each wire is soldered to its coresponding IDE pin.
The jerry-rigged 5V power source (the LiPo batery and the converter) are plugged into the HDD to provide the needed juice for its operation (check the picture below; the power source is the top row of parts). The USB hard drive casing is recycled as the casing for the laptop HDD to protect the sensitives and keep everything in place.
There. 40GB of storage space to play on the DS whatever mega-media there is on the HDD. Of course it’s still unwieldy – one comment on his site suggested using the new generation of thumb-sized hard disk drives. If you want to make your own, you can check his site out at the source link, but be warned that this is do-at-your-own-risk stuff that’s not for the faint of heart.
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