Chapter 8

Sleep, charging and the battery

Sleep and wake, the power menu, charging while off, the LEDs, battery protect and brightness.

On this page

Sleep
The power menu
Charging
The battery
Brightness and volume
The speakers

Sleep🔗

Close the lid, or tap power: the DS+ sleeps (suspend to RAM). A game in progress is held where it is.
Open the lid, or press power: it wakes. Wi-Fi reconnects about 2 seconds later. The press that wakes it does nothing else.

Asleep, the DS+ uses little power, but it does use some: for days away, power it off.

Hold power for a second: Sleep, Restart, Power off, Cancel. During a game, the game is saved and put away first; Cancel carries on with it, and so does waking from Sleep. In DSlot, its menu (X) → System → Power off does the same.

At power-off and restart, a goodbye picture stays on screen until the power goes.

Charging🔗

Charge from the DS+’s charging USB-C port (the other one is for USB devices).

You see	Means
Green LED	Running.
Amber LED	The charger is plugged in (charging or full), awake or asleep.
Dark screens, amber LED	Charging while “off” (below).

Charging while off. Plugging a charger into a DS+ that is off switches it on: the hardware does that by itself. Rather than start the shelf because a cable went in, nibOS charges it asleep, screens dark, with the amber LED lit. Press power (or open the lid) to start it properly; unplug it and it switches off again.

The battery🔗

DSlot’s status bar shows the charge, with a bolt or a plug while charging. DSlot’s menu (X) → System shows it too, with what the battery is doing: charging, with an estimate of the time to full; holding for battery protect; or full.

The charge shown is counted by the power chip as charge goes in and out of the battery.

Battery protect stops charging at about 80% and starts again at 75%, so a DS+ left on its charger ages its battery more slowly. Turn it on in DSlot’s menu (System → Battery protect), or in the console with nib battery protect on. nib battery shows the charge and the setting.

Long, demanding sessions (3D DS games at higher resolution) warm the DS+ and drain the battery faster; charging while playing them warms it further.

Brightness and volume🔗

Menu + Volume up / down: both screens’ brightness, from anywhere, in steps of 5%.
Each screen has its own level: DSlot’s menu → System → Top screen, Bottom screen, or nib brightness top 40 in the console. The lowest level is dim, never off.
Volume up / down: the volume of whatever is playing (speakers, wired or Bluetooth headphones), in steps of 5%.

Brightness is kept across restarts.

The speakers🔗

The DS+’s speaker amplifiers need a tuning file to play. nibOS ships its own, set conservatively. If you have the stock firmware, you can use its official tuning instead: DSlot’s menu → System → Import official tuning reads it from a stock card in TF2 (or a stock firmware image in Roms), which can take a few minutes. It applies at the next restart, which the page then offers. In the console, sudo nib audio import-tuning does the same. Headphones don’t need either.