Console Repair

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Anything and everything about retro and modern console repair.

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I need some help finding the issue with an Attic found Gamboy DMG-1 (lemmy.blahaj.zone)

submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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This gameboy was gifted to me from a Family member who found it one day in their Attic. I've tried fixing it a year ago, but since some parts never got delivered, it kinda slipped out of my mind until now.

The main thing I've replaced where the crusty green battery Contacts, but it did not seem to help with the original issue.

Upon turning it on, a bunch of stripes appear and then quickly disappear. Sometimes the whole screen is stripes, sometimes only 1-3. With disappearing I mean that they oddly seem to disintegrate in a very unnatural way. Its less pixels turning off, more like a liquid esc thing if I had to describe it.

How fast they stay and start disintegrating is dependent on how high the contrast is set, with it all the way up causing them to go almost instantly. With the contrast all the way down, on very rare occasions, I can see a corrupted Nintendo Logo like in the picture like its trying its best to start.

I only got 1 Game to test it all. The Motherboard inside looks a bit rough with the big metal thing in the middle looking a bit rusty. The screen board looks pretty good tho. I could not locate any leaking Capacitors, but some hard brown goo could be found sometimes. With all of that said, I can't pinpoint if this is a Motherboard or screen issue, so I'm not sure which to try and replace, do any of you folks have any suggestions? Thanks

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Then it would be a lot harder to fix. You can thoroughly clean everything and look carefully for damage to the components and traces on the PCB. You could try to replace something like the caps with a chance it would improve things, but I doubt it. The caps aren't under much stress in the Gameboy and are of good quality produced before the plague happened.

After that you really needs things like a scope to figure out where the issue could be. If I were to fix this I would try the following things:

Try a different cart, if the cart is bad it invalidates anything you try on the Gameboy. So rule that out ASAP, it's also the most easy step.
Check out the connection between the cart and the mainboard, this is the weakest point with a high probability of breaking
Check out the RAM, if the cart is good but the RAM is bad you get random crashes or games not starting at all.

You can pretty much rule out the screen, if you get to this point the screen is just fine. If the screen were to have issues, it would be all dark or all light or have random lines over the screen. If the Nintendo logo sweeps from top to the middle, the screen and the connection to the screen is fine.

In most cases fixing a Gameboy mainboard isn't worth the effort as they sold very well and thus are easy to get. If you want to you can put in a dozen hours trying to figure out what's wrong and fixing it.