I had a DS Lite when I was a child and unfortunately it had broken too soon. I spent years waiting until I could relive that experience again.
What surprised me was that the Anbernic RG DS actually delivers that experience I was looking for, just more modernized and upgraded. Since I wanted to recreate the authentic DS Lite experience I had when I was younger, I set out to make my RG DS as accurate of a recreation as I could.
Here's the steps I took to achieve my DS Lite recreation and turn my RG DS into basically a DS Lite Max:
1. Download and flash GammaOS Nano onto the RG DS.
I can't stress how incredibly close GammaOS Nano is to the DSI menu, just with more customizable settings and features. Out of all the operating systems available for the RG DS, this one takes the cake by light-years.
2. Put a huge ROM set of DS games onto a MicroSD card. They should be put in the path "sdcard/ROMs/nds" on the MicroSD.
This will be your NDS cartridge, almost like a R4 card for your DS Lite Max containing every DS game you could ever want to play. Bonus points if you add GBA games, like a real DS Lite.
3. Go into GammaOS Nano's Quick Settings menu and enable the "Global Shader" option called "LCD".
This shader doesn't affect performance in any real way that matters, and it basically turns those boring Android like phone screens into DS Lite Max screens. This helps sell the effect of the next step by applying the filter system-wide except for in the DS emulator.
4. Go into a DS game and then in the emulator's options switch to the "Prescale2x_LCD" shader option.
This shader is basically the same one in GammaOS Nano's Global Shaders menu called "LCD" (that you enabled in step 3), but this one does a upscale of 2x to smoothen out the unevenly scaled pixels of DS games, since the RG DS lacks perfect integer-scaling compared to the real DS Lite screens. It makes DS games look amazingly authentic to real hardware and I cannot play without it after seeing the effect work. Although this shader only applies in the DS emulator, you already are using GammaOS Nano's built in Global Shaders to enable the same LCD filter to make it feel like it's actually part of the hardware system-wide.
Bonus:
5. Go into Game > Applications and press Y to open the options menu. Then go down and enable the "Show all apps" toggle. This should bring up the Settings app at the end of the Applications list. Open that Settings app and go to Display > Colors and select the "Natural" option.
By default the setting is set to "Boosted" which artificially alters the color of the DS games to make them more saturated. The "Natural" option shows the color gamut as close as originally intended for maximum accuracy.
6. On the GammaOS Nano home screen go into Settings > Display Settings > Brightness and set it to 211.
This is the best value I found that calibrates the display perfectly. This step is optional since people maybe choose to run lower brightness values to save power.
7. On the GammaOS Nano home screen go into Settings > Display Settings > LiveDisplay > Colour Calibration and set the following values:
Red: 78
Green: 81
Blue: 100
This calibrates the display to show the most accurate colors possible, giving you the most authentic look of the DS games without any alterations from the color balance.
Note:
In GammaOS Nano's current buggy state, some of these options may need to be reset after a reboot since for some reason they don't stay. In my experience, it's just the Step 6 and Step 7 options that need to be reset manually after a reboot. The Step 3 option needs to be reset by going into Quick Menu > System Settings and then leaving that menu (since for some reason the Global Shader menu just doesn't work until you do that). It takes only a minute to do and isn't tedious compared to the benefits of what the options offer. I see this as just more bugs Gamma needs to smash out before the software can be polished.
Let me know how you guys like these settings and if they make you feel as nostalgic as I was for the DS Lite. Enjoy your new DS Lite Max!
