Feeding the monkey on my back.
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!
Onward!
Let’s get ’em Haint!