What’s old is new again
For the past year or so I’ve been really into reliving the old days of handhelds. It started with buying a reshelled GBA SP, but I longed to get another GBA similar to the one I owned as a teenager. It was the first version of the GBA that was laid out like a Game Gear. The one I had in highschool I’d modified with an afterburner front light with relative success. Unfortunately at some point during the move out of my childhood home and into my dad’s the screen got cracked and I threw it out, oh how I regret that now. During my Reddit browsing I found that people figured out how to modify those AGB’s with the backlit screens from the GBA SP. The best of both worlds! With that information I purchased the required parts and went the extra mile by upgrading the shell, buttons, replaced the plastic LCD cover with a glass one, a voltage regulator to make the LCD as bright as it was in the GBA SP, and an upgraded speaker. I tried installing an amplifier board twice and fried the AGB’s board the first time and the second time it still wasn’t working. Either I’m entirely incompetent (possible), or I somehow fried the amp board (also possible). I decided to cut my losses and just replace the speaker. After literal blood, sweat and tears I ended up with this.
Who’s a handsome GameBoy?
I love the colors and the screen looks incredible. It fits in my hands so well and i don’t get any cramps playing it for more than 15 minutes, it’s lovely. Pairing that with an EZ Flash IV and regular carts makes it a wonderful experience.
Since then I’ve set my eyes on building a customized original DMG, of which was my first ever game system that I received for Christmas as a VERY young child. It had the official GameBoy carrying case, at least 6 games, including the portable battery pack. That I ended up selling to a neighborhood kid for 10$ during a garage sale. OH the regret. My new plan is to buy a rough DMG and do pretty much what I did to the AGB, back light, bivert mod, upgraded speaker, new shell, new buttons and glass. I am still on the hunt, as well as fighting the urge to just put everything on a credit card.
In the meantime I’ve been looking for actual GameBoy cartridges to play on my AGB. I have a friend I talk to about stuff like this. I’ve known him since I was in high school and he’s the one guy that really enjoys the same nerdy hand built stuff that I do. We’ve talked and helped each other with a ton of stuff, mechanical keyboards, working on our cars (he helps me, I’m hopeless and he’s a grease monkey), squeezing every ounce of performance out of our aging PC’s, modifying SNES Classics, and now……custom handhelds.
During our conversations about my hunt for a DMG and what I plan on doing he got sucked in. Eventually I’m going to need to write his wife a letter apologizing for continuously introducing him to hobbies we just keep throwing money into like some bottomless pit. He ended up buying a broken DMG for 20$ and fixing it. He’s going to modify his as well. The whole point of this story is that he doesn’t really have any small retro game retailers around him in Miami that isn’t in some ghetto so this past weekend I made a couple visits to my local game stores to see what GameBoy games they had and boy did we make out.
The 5 on the left are mine, 5 on the right are Gaston’s (no one else buys games like GASTON). I think the prices were fairly reasonable. I even got a discount on everything!
Once I got home I went into autopilot mode of taking the stickers off, cleaning the cartridges
Dirty girl.
and the contacts, checking the internal batteries
Definitely already replaced, it’s adequate.
testing them using my favorite knockoff GameBoy Color.
Chinese knockoffs have their uses.
Tetris!
It was a nice mindless exercise and I ended up with some cleaned and working carts. Time to ship Gaston’s 5 off to Miami!