Yes. You can use whichever buttons you’d like (except Power). When you are installing the GBAccelerator, just connect the 3 button inputs to the solder points that correspond to the desired buttons (there is a list of them all on the Installation pages). You can even use two buttons or one button. Just connect the unused button inputs on the GBAccelerator to one that is connected to a button. Note: all three button inputs are identical; it doesn’t matter which one you connect to which button.
Frequently Asked Questions
Yes. You will be able to speed up and slow down GBA games just as you do with DS games.
A little bit. It’s hard to give exact battery life figures since they vary greatly depending on whether your game uses one or two screens, wireless, lots of sound, how bright you have your screens set, etc. The general trend during our testing was that the battery did tend to last a little bit less time when the DS was sped up and lasted longer when it was slowed down.
No. We’ve tested this mod for many hours and haven’t had any problems with units dying or extra heat or anything. The processor used by the DS is actually designed to be run quite a bit faster than the DS runs it at, so there’s plenty of room to play. We tested speeds that were quite a bit faster that the GBAccelerator runs things at, and the DS did fine. 1.8x was chosen as the maximum speed because that was the fastest that the wireless would work consistently.
Yes! The wireless itself works just fine, even between two units running at different speeds. Pictochat works great. Other than that it depends on the game as to how well it works; some seem to let you switch speeds frequently and don’t miss a beat. Some will have errors while transfering games during download play at different speeds, but once the game has loaded they work fine. Some games get pretty unreliable as the speeds of two connected machines get farther apart, but these games are few and far between. It also depends a bit on which DS you have; the DS Lite seems to be a tiny bit more stable with OC/UC’d wireless games.
Steady=normal speed, single-blink=fast, double-blink=ultra, and fading in/out=slow-motion. Note: these codes do not apply when using wireless since that also causes the power LED to blink.
When you first boot your DS, it runs at normal speed (67mhz). Fast speed is 88mhz (~1.3x). Ultra is 116mhz (~1.7x), and slow-motion is 44mhz (~.66x). Note that the actual frequencies produced by the GBAccelerator DS are 1/4 the above listed frequencies.
All testing on the DS has worked fine. There have been some reports of DS Lites that crash when you try to speed them up. The problem is rare enough that we haven’t been able to figure out a way to tell whether it’s going to work or not before actually installing the GBAccelerator DS yet.
Yes. Instructions for the DS can be found here and for the DS Lite can be found here.
Yes! As long as both GBA’s are running in the same speed mode, you can link together without problem.
