Time to celebrate the Nintendo DS Lite's 20th anniversary by bringing it into 2026! My childhood games console still plays games just great, but the battery's shot and if I forget the proprietary charging cable, no more Animal Crossing for me. So I put in a few key mods to breath new life into it, without modifying how games play.
I've already put my DS Lite into an aftermarket transparent case, and now it's time to give it some modern creature comforts. The terrible aftermarket battery I put in to replace the failing OEM battery many years ago has run its course, and while I picked up a USB A to Nintendo proprietary connector cable a while ago, it would be way easier to just have a USB C port like the rest of my devices.
If you can't find the charger and the battery is dead, I wouldn't be surprised! Two decades later, these two mods will bring it back to life.
The charging port
First up: the USB port. A guy by the username rorosaurus made a USB C mod over 6 years ago, and fully open sourced the design. You can find it here: https://github.com/rorosaurus/nds-lite-usb-c. The original charger used 5.2V at 450mA, so we're very lucky that a standard USB port does 5V at 500mA. There's no hardware changes necessary apart from changing the port, and it charges at about the same speed as it did before. It also includes the resistors necessary to make it compliant and functional with USB C to C cables - see my previous video on why that's important!
While he did stock them on Tindie for a while, they've been sold out for years, and are most likely not coming back. Luckily for us, China is the answer - you can find the exact same design super cheaply on AliExpress. Here's the one I bought.
Getting the alignment is a bit tricky and I suggest lining it up with the shell and marking where it's supposed to sit before you start soldering it down.
While this mod doesn't take too long to pull off, it does require intermediate soldering experience. As there's no through-hole pins, and it needs to be soldered directly down to the open pads on the mainboard, a hot air rework station is the best way to go about this to get all 4 ground pads melted and in place at once. It's still achievable with a soldering iron and some patience, but you'll only get one shot at the alignment.
The battery replacement
Next up for the battery. I was hesitant to go and buy yet another aftermarket battery specifically made for the console as there's just no reputable sources to buy them from. They all massively exaggerate their capacity to a comical level, and have likely been sitting on a shelf for years - there's really not enough demand to be continually manufacturing them after all these years.
So I set out to find a generic replacement battery that would fit inside the battery compartment of the DS Lite. It's using a standard lithium ion chemistry and you can get pouch cell batteries in just about every shape and size. After measuring up the compartment and using a bit of AI help, I found that the 703048 cell will fit the best. It's a hair thicker than the stock battery, and it's not quite as wide as the compartment, but we need space to route the wires anyway. The battery compartment cover is a bit tight, but it sits flush once the cell is (gently) massaged into place.
I bought this battery off AliExpress. I'm certain that it too is over-representing its capacity at 1200mAh, but searching online suggests that it should have a 1000mAh capacity, which exactly matches the OEM battery that the DS Lite originally came with. Everything else about it checks out in terms of voltage and charge/discharge capacity.
The catch of course is that this generic cell doesn't have the pads to push against the pins in the DS Lite's battery compartment. It comes with two wires, which can be cut and soldered directly to the pins instead. Be mindful to strip and solder the wires one at a time, so as not to accidentally have them touch and short. Use the old battery to be sure you're soldering them the right way around - I doubt the console has reverse polarity protection.
The result
It's honestly something I don't even think about! As the original charging port was slightly larger than the USB C replacement, it required no modification to the shell. The battery also just works right out of the box - it makes no change to the slow charging speeds as that's limited by the DS itself, but my testing shows it to be just about on-par with the OEM battery.
I ran my test using this DS battery life timer homebrew ROM, via a flashcart in my DS Lite. I measured 4 hours and 45 minutes of runtime with the screen brightness and volume on full. Nintendo's own website suggests a 5-8 hour runtime, with reports online suggesting it's closer to 5 hours. Considering that the flashcart itself uses more power than a standard game cartridge, coming 15 minutes under suggests to me that it's matching the original 1000mAh capacity that I would expect.
Overall, my DS Lite is running just the way I remember it doing so, with USB C to boot. I can highly recommend these two additions if you're looking to bring some nostalgia into your life.