What would you do if you were biking away the pounds in the basement, in the middle of an intense boss battle, and your wife came down the stairs to show you this?
I surmised it was the infamous hinge crack problem, manifested in so many launch models. It had seemingly struck at last after delaying its own little armageddon for a full year after the warranty ran out... and oh, did it ever strike.
Nintendo wanted $82.50 to fix it for me, with their fabled phone reps playing dumb when I tried to bring up the whole hinge fiasco. Considering that was nearly ⅔ the price of a brand new unit, I opted to troll the Internet to see what other options I had.
With Nintendo failing me, I decided to seek out other options. I had just come off the high of fixing my laptop by downloading the service manual, disassembling it entirely, reassembling it, and finding the problem was actually in the external power supply—but I didn't actually break anything, so I felt like I could perhaps handle replacing the plastic housing from my wife's original DS Lite with a less, er, official set of plastics.
The Internet is a wonderful place for things like this. I found what I was looking for at an unnamed Hong Kong company. They will remain unnamed because they also deal in certain unlicensed accessories favored by the cheapskate contingent, and we don't want to be encouraging that here. That said, there's certainly nothing illegal or immoral about getting yourself a new housing for a broken model that Nintendo won't fix for you; it's just good sense. I put in an order for the "premium" housing—more on that later—and a week or so later, this arrived:
(Actually, that wasn't what arrived, but what did arrive was a little slip of paper informing me that I needed to be home to receive the package, something about certified mail. A short trip to the post office later, I'd exchanged that little slip of paper for the above box.)
It certainly looked like something I'd expect to see buried in the dark corner of an import store. It was packed in a bubble envelope and of course the box got a little beat-up on the way across the Pacific, but it was all good. My wife did actually pick the green; that particular color isn't available stateside. If you poke around the store's site you'll find a number of choices, from standard white (cheapest) to a Zelda-bundle knockoff and even translucent cases.
Inside the box, I got a sense of just how shady some operators are.
There's a fake serial number on the underside, along with a verbatim copy of the text from the underside of a real DS. It made me wonder if there was a hidden area of the site where I could pick myself up a complete knockoff DS... one loaded with 100 LCD games or some such. Manufacturing a housing like this probably does cross the line into counterfeiting. Thankfully, I think that's as close to illegal as this particular undertaking of mine gets, and in any event, I have no intention of passing the completed system off as genuine.
Inside the box was quite the assortment of parts. Not only did I get the lime green housing, but all the little bits and bobs that would be required for a complete color conversion (which, in fact, I was doing). There was a little green D-pad, buttons, rubber feet... even replacement internal parts such as the pins and springs that make up the the shoulder button assemblies.
(If you ever have the occasion to disassemble a DS Lite, the shoulder buttons are one of the two things that you will remember, haunting your nightmares. You need to slip a pin through both holes in the shoulder button and a tiny spring in the correct orientation, then simultaneously insert the end of the pin into its home in the housing and stick one end of the spring into its own slot. I've done it at least a dozen times and I still screw up half the time.)
I surmised it was the infamous hinge crack problem, manifested in so many launch models. It had seemingly struck at last after delaying its own little armageddon for a full year after the warranty ran out... and oh, did it ever strike.
Nintendo wanted $82.50 to fix it for me, with their fabled phone reps playing dumb when I tried to bring up the whole hinge fiasco. Considering that was nearly ⅔ the price of a brand new unit, I opted to troll the Internet to see what other options I had.
With Nintendo failing me, I decided to seek out other options. I had just come off the high of fixing my laptop by downloading the service manual, disassembling it entirely, reassembling it, and finding the problem was actually in the external power supply—but I didn't actually break anything, so I felt like I could perhaps handle replacing the plastic housing from my wife's original DS Lite with a less, er, official set of plastics.
The Internet is a wonderful place for things like this. I found what I was looking for at an unnamed Hong Kong company. They will remain unnamed because they also deal in certain unlicensed accessories favored by the cheapskate contingent, and we don't want to be encouraging that here. That said, there's certainly nothing illegal or immoral about getting yourself a new housing for a broken model that Nintendo won't fix for you; it's just good sense. I put in an order for the "premium" housing—more on that later—and a week or so later, this arrived:
(Actually, that wasn't what arrived, but what did arrive was a little slip of paper informing me that I needed to be home to receive the package, something about certified mail. A short trip to the post office later, I'd exchanged that little slip of paper for the above box.)
It certainly looked like something I'd expect to see buried in the dark corner of an import store. It was packed in a bubble envelope and of course the box got a little beat-up on the way across the Pacific, but it was all good. My wife did actually pick the green; that particular color isn't available stateside. If you poke around the store's site you'll find a number of choices, from standard white (cheapest) to a Zelda-bundle knockoff and even translucent cases.
Inside the box, I got a sense of just how shady some operators are.
Inside the box was quite the assortment of parts. Not only did I get the lime green housing, but all the little bits and bobs that would be required for a complete color conversion (which, in fact, I was doing). There was a little green D-pad, buttons, rubber feet... even replacement internal parts such as the pins and springs that make up the the shoulder button assemblies.
(If you ever have the occasion to disassemble a DS Lite, the shoulder buttons are one of the two things that you will remember, haunting your nightmares. You need to slip a pin through both holes in the shoulder button and a tiny spring in the correct orientation, then simultaneously insert the end of the pin into its home in the housing and stick one end of the spring into its own slot. I've done it at least a dozen times and I still screw up half the time.)