I was debating whether or not I should write this because I didn’t want to pile on the wagon of everyone else talking about it, even though no one looks at this website. So whatever!
Last Thursday, the man known as “TotalBiscuit”, or John Peter Bain succumbed to that dragon cancer. I’m not going to pretend that I knew him, because I didn’t. I knew him as much as any other fan did, be it through his YouTube videos, his sports casting, involvement in e-sports, his strong stance on consumer rights, or whatever else I’m missing, the guy was prolific. I wanted to write a short article about how he affected my life and how I approach games.
I can’t remember how long ago I came across him, it feels like he’s just always been there in the background. I want to say he came on my radar around the time I was huge into the Destructoid website and followed Jim Sterling, I somehow came across one of TB’s “WTF is…..” videos, where he goes through the options of the game, and the first half hour to an hour of game play and I really enjoyed it. I’ve followed him since then and enjoyed his content immensely. He was very open and fair about how he reviewed games and what he was looking for. Not everyone liked him, but from what I saw he was at least respected because he was principled and did not allow developers to push him around. I wouldn’t do it justice trying to explain it so I’m just going to link to the wiki that does a good job. Link here: TB’s consumer advocacy .
Here’s TB reviewing a game I love/hate. Space Run!
I enjoyed his “WTF is….” videos, his collaborations with another YouTuber Jesse Cox (especially their Terraria series, you can feel his frustration with Jesse, it’s hilarious), and his Co-Optional podcast. He turned me onto a lot of games and is responsible for a good 25% of my Steam library. His approach to games is something I need to take to heart again because I’ve forgotten it. He liked the games he liked, whether they were huge AAA titles or indie games, if you made a game he enjoyed, even if it was flawed, if he enjoyed it that was good enough for him. In his reviews he wouldn’t mince words, he would tell you what he liked and what he didn’t like and would rate it accordingly. He was arguably to video games what Oprah was to books, if they raved about it people would buy it. Game developers mostly took what he said to heart, the case I’m most familiar with was the game Warframe, he did a “WTF is…” video about it years ago and the developers took his suggestions and implemented what they could into the game. The game is still fairly popular now all these years later and on the day he passed the the community manager and community director shut down their weekly stream and they were visibly upset. Link here: Warframe ends stream early. The day he died and the following few days he popped up in almost every gaming subreddit I’m subscribed to, and practically every gaming news site. It’s hard to deny how much of an impact he had on the community.
He really had a passion for games and I wish I had that. He believed in it so much that he built a career out of it. I used to have it, and I truly hope i can recapture it. I’m making progress but it’s slow.
On friday I downloaded Warframe and gave it a go, I’m probably about 5-6 hours into it and am enjoying it. On top of that I decided to start playing Enter The Gungeon again and am making frustratingly slow progress, but I did make it to the 3rd level. Once I can remember to take screenshots during game play I’ll write up an article about it, it’s fun but holy hard Batman. I’m also going back through his “WTF is…” videos and will be checking what I’ve got in my Steam library vs what he’s reviewed and will give a few of them a chance. I can’t decide what to play for myself so why not let TB decide on a few games for me.
The last thing I’m going to leave is the Twitter post his wife made the day he passed. RIP TB.
In my never ending quest to fill the gaping void in my life by filling it with material things, I have been on the hunt for an original DMG gameboy. I plan on rebuilding it same as I did with my GBA except this would involve a bivert chip, backlight, new shell, buttons, glass screen cover, etc.
I found one for sale on eBay as “no power, for parts” and decided to take a gamble. Looking closely at the photos I saw the battery terminals were corroded and was confidant that was the cause of the no power. I paid $16.49 for it and a few days later the fun began!
She’s a bit rough!
I put batteries in to confirm and it did not turn on at all. Time to do the needful!
I took it completely apart, first items on the list were the battery terminals and boy were they grody.
Holy corrosion Batman.
Those went into a vinegar bath while i took everything else apart to clean with ISO. Next up was the front LCD/controller board.
That speaker is 10 kinds of gross.
That speaker was awful, it took 3 cotton swabs to get all that grossness off, and another swab to clean the board itself. I was disappointed to see the LCD had a pretty deep scratch in it that I hadn’t noticed in the eBay photos. The back wasn’t as bad but the back of the speaker was rusted because of course it was.
This DMG has lived a rough life.
Next up the mainboard!
Not bad!
It wasn’t nearly as bad as the LCD board but I still gave it a quick once over with cotton swabs and ISO as well as scrubbing the power switch with a tooth brush and blasting it with compressed air.
After giving the shell a good scrub a dub dub in the sink with dish soap and a took brush I dried the shell as best I could and blasted all the small crevices with more compressed air. I fished the battery terminals out of the vinegar and was happy to see they had lost almost all the corrosion, so I gave those a quick scrub with the toothbrush and put them back in the shell and put the front board back on to see if I’d fixed the no power issue. I flicked the switch and heard the unmistakable gameboy ding! but no video! I was so close. After doing a little more research online I decided to try squirting ISO into the contrast wheel and going ham on it with a toothbrush. It worked!
It worked! Sort of!
The telltale missing vertical lines, the result of broken contacts in the lcd ribbon. An annoyance but not impossible to fix! most people are able to repair these missing lines by gently rubbing their soldering iron along the lcd ribbon, heating up the metal inside and reconnecting whatever broken connections there were in the ribbon.
Sadly after an hour of touching every square millimeter of that ribbon with my iron I couldn’t fix it. It was pretty late at that point so I figured I’d peel off the protective layer on the front to see if there were any scratches to the actual glass, and that was how I learned the DMG has a polarizer on the back as well as the front. So now that whole thing is completely useless. The LCD is soldered to the front board and no one has been able to come up with a reliable way to replace the LCD. There’s also the fact that no one is reproducing these LCDs.
So for now I’ve wrapped up the DMG until I can find a DMG with a working LCD I can use.
At the suggestion of my brother I looked for a copy of Dragon Warrior Monsters 2 and found a mislabeled copy on eBay for about 12 bucks.
He’s a little beat up but otherwise in ok shape.
The first thing I did was check the board, clean the contacts, then put it into one of my systems to check it and it wouldn’t load! It would just go to a white screen after the Nintendo logo. I was super annoyed because it was advertised as working. I sent a message to the seller letting them know the game wasn’t working and they were nice enough to apologize and issue me a refund and told me not to worry about shipping it back. After stewing about it a little bit I decided to see if I could fix it, it was already broken, what was the worst that would happen, I’d break it more? I took the board out of the cartridge and gave the entire thing a wipe down with 90% ISO and trying it again. No dice! I looked up which components were which on the board and decided to try re-flowing the solder joints on the ROM chip.
You’re up soldering iron!
My goal was to very slowly and gently run the tip of the soldering iron across the contacts for the ROM chip, and that would hopefully heat up the solder enough that it would reconnect all the pins.
The chip highlighted in red stores the ROM of the game.
After a couple passes along each side of the chip i put it back together, put it in my GB Boy Colour and turned it on…..
Huzzah! Success!
It worked! I was shocked! A total shot in the dark and it fixed the game! Now I can do what I assume most people do when they buy used games, check the save files!
What on earth did I stumble onto?
Holy crap the previous owner had 148 hours into this game and had max level monsters.
Ho
Lee
Shit
Well now I feel bad deleting the game.
Now that I’ve got the game working it’s time to clean the cartridge , and it was covered in grime, the back was completely covered in stickers from at least 3 different game stores. It was so bad I had to soak the back in ISO for a couple minutes before I could scrape it all off.
So sticky.
The entire cartridge was scuffed to hell but the back was the worst.
Almost as scuffed up as my car!
I fixed it a few days ago and I’m still blown away that I was able to get it working. Now it’s time to play my first Dragon Warrior game! I’m a few hours into it and I really enjoy it. It’s a gameboy color title and I’d completely forgotten what a GBC game looked like. The team that colorized this game did a fantastic job, it’s incredibly vibrant and looks great!
