Hacking an Original Gameboy to play better than new
The original Nintendo Gameboy was released in 1989 and went on to be one of highest-selling video game consoles of all time.
I was born in the mid-90s, so while I wasn’t around for the heyday of the original Gameboy, many of my friends were catching dozens of Pokemon on their Gameboy Color and Advance systems. I’d say I was mildly jealous of my friends, as my parents wouldn’t let me have any video games until I turned 10. Since my youth, I’ve played quite a lot of video games and owned a lot of various systems spanning decades of releases.
A few weeks ago I thought to myself: “why don’t I own any older handhelds?” I quickly made some searches on eBay, and a few deal-addicted days later I was the proud owner of 4 used original Gameboys in various states of disrepair. All of the devices I purchased had some issue with them, from not turning on, to being incredibly dirty, to missing parts and broken displays.
As all of the devices were manufactured over 30 years ago and were handled for hundreds of hours by kids, this is understandable. The biggest issue with original GameBoys are their displays, which are both incredibly dim as well as have a high rate of pixel/line decay. I might write another article explaining the technical process for why this occurs, but I believe it is due to the micro-capacitors in the display digitizer simply dying. Edit: after some quick searching it appears that there are some hacks to fix “pixel cancer” and line death, but they don’t solve the problem entirely, and the displays are still rather dim.
Pixel death issues are so common, in fact, that people have designed newer displays with LCD technology and brightness settings akin to today’s phones, to repair and upgrade the dying tech. In fact, one can purchase one online for <$50 if you have the want and know-how to replace it yourself. Other people may opt for a complete replaced package, however these restored devices go for ~$200. There are also many replacement shells on the market that go for about $10. These are great for when you’re not sure if there’s petrified kid snot on a used console you bought (as in my case!) or you just want the thing to look nice. The particular display I bought also has a fake color filter with 36 selectable channels, which takes the green monochrome display and gives some nice contrast with colors.
So, being a DIY-minded person, I bought the display and a shell and got to work performing surgery on one of the devices. Replacing the display can be simple enough once you know what you are doing, but there are always hazards involved when repairing tech — small elements can be fried by a minor static shock, thin ribbon cables can be broken. On my first attempt of putting an old motherboard in the new shell, it seemingly stopped working for no apparent reason!! (Once I regain my sense of pride, I will look again into that..).
After some tinkering, I finally got all the wires and cables connected, and when I flipped the power switch, the Gameboy sprung to life in a vivid display of color and brightness. In a side-by-side comparison, it’s really amazing to see — how did kids make out anything on the dim, green display??
In a future article, I hope to add a bluetooth transmitter for audio, and will detail that process as I go. I also bought an original 2DS, DSLite, Gameboy Color, and Gameboy Advance, all of which have some issue or another — when I get to fixing all of them, I’ll write down my process for others to see.
