Chosen Solution
I recently purchased a broken ds lite off of ebay to attempt repairing it as a little project. It won’t read ds or gameboy games, so I assumed it just had some damaged pins. I opened up the ds and to my surprise, all the pins appeared to perfectly intact. I even put gentle pressure on each one and they all appeared well-attached to the motherboard. I then theorized that the pins could possibly be dirty, so after cleaning them off with some q-tips and rubbing alcohol, I assembled the ds and tested it. (Spoiler alert: that still didn’t fix my problem, and all that my endeavors produced was a really clean ds lite lmao) The two slots might need to be replaced, but it seemed like too much of a coincidence that both parts would be faulty. I’m not sure what else could be the problem, if anyone has any ideas I’m all ears. Thank you!
From what you are saying, it is most likely that the card reader is fried from heavy use by the previous owner(s). You generally cannot fix it separately. The best option would be to buy a new motherboard off ebay. They typically cost from 10-30 dollars used. When you are looking, look at the pictures of the listings with the left Styrophome cover is not damaged. This is the piece that will detect a card has been inserted. If you don’t think getting a new motherboard is worth it, look at your old one and see if any wires are frayed on the left hand side. Good Luck and tell me how it goes!!!
Hey I thought this might help if it’s not too late but I just purchased a ds lite from gamestop today and thought it a bad one not wanting to read games, in a non attempting way I had the games already inserted in the system while it was off and powered it on and boom the games finally were able to read (both ds and gameboy game) hope this
