For this new adventure into the realm of restoring tech, it’s time to help the one device that more or less started handheld gaming for the entire world. The original Game Boy Model: DMG.
Old and gray
The original Game Boy was surely never an impressive looking device, but nonetheless it was the most important handheld to entertain virtually every child from the early nineties all the way to the mid 2000s if you count it’s later iterations (i.e., Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance).
This particular model I found on eBay for €40 including shipping costs. And except for the vertical lines it is in great condition. Surely it’s been faded a little on the housing, but still everything works as expected apart from the screen.
Finding the right guide
So since I don’t know how to do anything without looking it up, I took to Google in order to find out how to repair this issue. And there are a lot of the same guides out there. This is the one I followed:
The trick is more or less to open the Game Boy and to get the front of the shell off of the device. That means unscrewing the entire thing and briefly removing the ribbon connecting the screen PCB from the second PCB with the CPU on it. (Yes, the original Game Boy has 2 separate motherboards instead of just one as all subsequent Boy models.
After that is done and the front shell is lifted, it’s all about connecting the PCBs once again and peeling off the rubber band just below the screen. Then the Game Boy can be powered on with the contrast level very high in order to clearly see the missing pixel lines on the screen. Now I was able to probe the section directly below the screen with a fine soldering iron (where the connections are made by the ribbon cable of the display). I used a temperature of about 420 °C.
So step by step with each application of the soldering iron to approximately where the solder connections underneath the board went along, the pixel lines started to come back. Until in the end all the pixels were completely intact again.
After letting the PCB cool down and putting the Game Boy together, I’ve tested it for about a month. Then I’ve put it back onto eBay and was able to sell it for €80.
