repair - nintendo ds battery-less

Last update: Sat Jan 10 23:04:54 2026

See my other Gameboy related pages

Bought a bunch of GameBoy/NDS last year 2023, and started fixing a few for the practice and for the fun. One must have been stored in the dirt or something approaching, how full of dirt (no better word) there was even inside.
I managed to make it partially work again, here's what I did (Jan2024).

Presentation

Initial status

VERY dirty, like old sawdust inside and dirty as hell outside

Battery dead (measures 0 volt)

GBA port dead (partially covered in that beautiful blue copper oxide)

NDS port ok!

Screen has some dead LIGHT rows (a few on each screen) but image pixels are ok, so usable. Touch is ok.

Power port oxydized

Action plan

Battery is dead, not planning to spend on a new one. But problem is that NDS will NOT boot on wallwart power if it doesn't detect a battery (and a healthy one please, less than 3.6v undercharge protection will kick in). Considering the power port was goneski, and that seeing its overall shape it will be "for practice" only, I decided to make it a wallwart only model by simulating a battery (5v to 3.7v buck).

Bye battery
Desoldered the old dead power connector, and then 2 ferrites (wasted space)
Desoldered the battery connector
Stuck a DC-DC buck converter (a cheapo MH-MINI-360) with tape
Stuck a USB-C female connector module where the power was with LOTS of (way too much) epoxy
Dremeled a hole where the battery was in the back cover to allow for the buck converter and cables
Dremeled out all the excess epoxy and USB-C module board so I could put back the back cover.

Pictures

Power connector, ferrites x2, battery connector: bye bye.

With the buck converter.

Had to dremel the sh*t of the USB-C board to let the lid close, but in the end it did.

WIth the back cover installed (the battery covers all that)

It works!

All content on this site is shared under the MIT licence (do what u want, don't sue me, hat tip appreciated)
electrogeek.tokyo ~ Formerly known as Kalshagar.wikispaces.com and electrogeek.cc (AlanFromJapan [2009 - 2026])