Week 195 was posted by Charanjit Chana on 2021-07-19.
I found my GameBoy a few months ago and found that it had missing lines on the display. I've had it since the early '90s followed by a GameBoy Color and a Nintendo DS Lite. I have some good memories of these hand held devices but the missing lines on the GameBoy's display was really disappointing to see.
I wasn't sure of the cause but assumed it was irreversible without buying a new display. I didn't even have the tools to get into it to find out what kind of effort it would all require. And then I stumbled across this:
Modded my first Game Boy today! Isn’t it a beauty? I still have to install a bivert chip to inverse the screen contrast, but I couldn’t help having a go to test it out. The original had tons of broken screen lines I fixed up as well. Super pleased with myself 🧡😊
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After a brief exchange turns out I should have just googled how you fix a problem like this as it's really easy. I got the right screwdriver and once I was in it was easy but there was still a few months between figuring that out and having the confidence to go ahead and do it.
Spent the last few days watching videos on how to fix missing lines on the screen of a GameBoy. I still have my original one from the 90s and feeling brave so I’ll be attempting to fix it later this week.
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After watching a lot of videos on the subject, turns out it's a really common problem and can be solved with a soldering iron.
My GameBoy is back in business! The screen is trash though, forgot there was no backlight. I could mod it, but not sure I’m ready for that adventure just yet.
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Turns out my memory isn't so good and the screen is trash in anything but the most perfect light. @hellogeri pointed out she had installed a backlight in the past and that's exactly what I'd like to do but even just fixing the screen was a big adventure for me. I'll have to do a ton of research before I even think about doing that but it would make the GameBoy a way better device.
The biggest kicker was that my saved game in Pokémon Yellow became corrupt at some point in the last 20 years so I've had to restart the game from scratch. I really put the effort in so my kids could have a go but with the screen being so poor to look at I'm not sure how appealing it would be to them but with the summer holidays fast approaching it could be a bit of fun for them to play around with.