Nintendo Game Boy mods and other customization products for vintage hand-held electronics. Find modifications for the Game Boy DMG, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Pocket, Game Boy Advance and SEGA Game Gear. Top modifications include Game Boy Backlight, Game Boy Color Backlight, Game Boy Advance Backlight, AGS-101 and IPS LCDs. Game Boy Bivert/hex mods. The Nintendo Gameboy was by no means an example of the most powerful handheld even during its prime in the early 90s. Its competitors had front-lit or back-lit screens and were in color. What the Gameboy did, however, was provide great games.
The first step is to remove the back cover of the DMG. There are six screws, and depending on when your Gameboy was made, they are either going to be triwing or phillips. Triwing screws, for those of you unfamiliar, are Nintendo’s favorite way to make opening their products just ever so slightly more irritating. If you don’t want to spend a couple dollars on a triwing driver, you can do what I did and use a small flathead in one of the three slots in the screws. It’s not super difficult, but you definitely want to be careful to avoid stripping the screws. There’s four obvious ones on the back of the Gameboy, and two inside the battery compartment. You’ll need to remove all of these.
Once you take those screws out, don’t pull the Gameboy apart quickly. There’s a fairly short ribbon connector connecting the screen half of the Gameboy to the circuitry half. Carefully hinge unit so the screen half is face down on your desk with the circuitry portion sticking vertically upward. You could disconnect the ribbon cable at this point (it’s a ZIF socket, so the connector just slides out), but I didn’t want to bother having to reconnect it when I was done. You can do this repair quite easily without having to put this connector back in.
The next guide (which should be up next week some time) will have us mounting the screen and a few other things in the case. Besides the (at this point unicorn-like) Pi Zero, the part people are having the hardest time finding is the screen. There is some great discussion going on in the forums about this, but I wanted to gather some of that information here since loads of people are asking about it.
Why not GPIO?
In the search for an alternative to the Adafruit composite screen, you’re bound to come across at least one GPIO-based screen like the Adafruit PiTFT (if it mentions having a touch screen, it’s likely a GPIO screen). The GPIO screens will work, sure, but there are a few good reasons to hold out for a composite screen:
Does it *have* to be the Adafruit one?
No, in fact there are a lot of options out there. But there are a few things to keep in mind:
5V vs 12V: Adware cleaner mac chip. Most of these screens are intended for use with a 12V power source (including the Adafruit one). Most of them can be modified to run off 5V, some more simply than others (the Adafruit one is especially easy). Some actually tolerate 5V right out of the box even though they are made for 12V. Eso magic dmg enchantment set. There are also cheap 5V -> 12V converters you can get for a few bucks on amazon.
Controller board: Make sure you don’t get just the screen (lots of ebay listings are just the screen, which is useless to us without the controller board). Also make sure you have at least some idea of the size of the controller board. The Adafruit board is almost the same size of the screen itself so it fits nicely behind it. Some are much smaller, and some are too wide and require modifications to make it even fit in the case.
Source: You can find loose screens/controller boards like the Adafruit screen, but you can also buy a cheap backup camera monitor like this one and get a working 3.5″ composite screen that way. But watch out! As some forum users and I have found, even under the same product listing like the Amazon one linked to above, depending on which seller you get it from, you may get drastically different results. Convert dmg to vmdk on windows 10.
Both these screens were purchased from the Amazon link above. They look identical from the front: https://formepowerful441.weebly.com/blog/fiddler-download-for-mac.
From the back you can see they aren’t quite the same:
Inside, you can see they are totally different! The one on the left is too wide to fit in the Game Boy without cutting the edges a bit. Worse, though, it doesn’t work with some screen modes (some resolutions seem to just blink for no reason including some boot screens, as well as the Doom main menu), and has horrible image ghosting after staying on a screen for more than a few seconds (I tried it with both 5V and 12V). The one on the right though, works great! For reference I got the left one from a seller called EPATHDEALS, and the one on the right came from a seller called Niceshopping.
Below is a list of known working/not working screens from the forums (mainly this thread). Feel free to shoot me a note or leave a comment below if you have one I can add!
Gameboy Dmg 01 Backlight Kit
UPDATE: The wiki is up! It is located here: http://sudomod.com/wiki
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