*thunder*
So anyone who has played a Game Boy Pocket
probably knows how irritating it is finding JUST the right
angle to get some good light so you could see to play.
In this video, I'm gonna show you how to install a backlight,
which will forever change the way you play these classic games on your Game Boy Pocket.
The first thing I want to do is show you how an LCD, like the one in the Game Boy, actually works.
First, you have a pane of glass, with some liquid crystal on it.
There's also some other stuff on there I'm not showing like a grid of wires and some stuff like that.
Then, there's another piece of glass that goes on top of that.
And then there's a polariser film on the top and another polariser on the bottom.
And last, there's a reflective layer on the bottom.
The idea is that light comes from the front and it bounces off the reflector and back to your eyes.
So what we wanna do is remove the reflective layer on the bottom, and replace it with a backlight.
The backlight will shine light directly through the screen, to your eyes.
OK, so now that you know what it is we are going to do,
let me tell you why it is you might actually want to do this,
and I think the main reason is is so that you can experience, um, these original classic Game Boy games,
more or less in the way that they were intended to be experienced on a Game Boy like this,
without suffering with the horrible lighting situation that these machines come with from the factory.
I suspect 20 years ago we were probably far more willing to tolerate non-backlit screens
because we weren't used to devices like iPhones and other modern devices with LCD screens being backlit,
and, uh, now we're so used to it, it's just difficult to go back.
You'll also get to see me ruin a perfectly good Game Boy,
and hopefully you'll learn from my experience what NOT to do when you're doing this project.
And stick around 'til the end, and I'm going to show you a couple of alternatives
to even having to do any kind of modification.
First thing to know is that you're going to need a tri-wing screwdriver to handle those irritating little screws
that Nintendo used.
I bought mine from eBay for about 2 bucks, but it took a couple of weeks for delivery from Hong Kong.
First, you take out any ROM cartridge and the batteries.
Then, remove four screws on the side and two screws in the battery compartment.
The case should come apart pretty easily at this point.
Next thing to do is remove these three screws holding the logic board to the front case.
OK. Now, time to unlock the ribbon cable that goes to the LCD screen.
Just pull out these two levers and you should be able to pull the cable out.
OK. So, here's the screen. This is where the hard part begins. See this ribbon cable on the back?
You cannot remove it. Unfortunately, it is easily damaged and this is where I screwed up and ruined the screen.
Let's have a look at the backlighting kit I ordered on eBay. This cost me about $17, by the way.
You'll see it comes with two wires, a new polariser film and the actual backlight.
The reason it has a new polariser is that you're likely to ruin the one on the existing screen.
You'll have to peel off the reflective layer and the polariser from the back of the screen.
I didn't even realise it at this point, but I wasn't even getting the polariser yet,
so I had to go back and peel that off too.
OK, so here's the new polariser film. It has a protective film to help keep you from getting fingerprints on it.
Try to only hold it from the edges.
Also, be careful which direction you lay the polariser, because if you put it 90° off,
you'll notice the whole screen looks black.
Next, you'll need to solder the wires to the positive and negative on the main board.
OK, so here's my first test, and you can see the backlight works, but the screen is no longer functioning.
Upon closer inspection, I realised that I had damaged the ribbon cable beyond repair.
So. I actually had to go out and buy ANOTHER Game Boy Pocket from eBay.
Fortunately, a Game Boy Pocket only typically runs about 25 bucks, so it wasn't that big a deal,
but hopefully you can learn from my mistake what NOT to do,
and I'l show you a little trick on how to do this better.
I found that I could peel up the corner, making sure to also get the polariser
along with the reflective layer this time.
And I would just spray a drop of WD-40 under there. WD-40 will eat away at the adhesives but will not hurt glass.
And then I used a Costco card, although any card should work, and, eh, as you can see,
I was able to slide the whole thing off, without ever putting any stress on that darn ribbon cable.
I, uh, had to clean the screen several times to get the residual WD-40 off, so I used a similar method
with a microfibre cloth and some glass cleaner.
As you can see, it worked this time and here's what it looks like all reassembled;
and as you can see it even looks great in total darkness.
In fact, this actually looks better in person than it does on camera because the bottom of the screen
tends to overexpose on my camera and the contrast just looks a little better to the human eye.
OK, so here's a little trick I want to show you that I didn't show in the main video, but when you,
uh, take the Game Boy apart and when you need to get the screen out, sometimes it's stuck,
and, uh, the easiest way to get that out is to take the Game Boy and kind of flex it a little bit like that,
and the screen will just pop right out.
The other thing I wanna say is be real careful when you're putting the Game Boy back together,
because you need to make sure the wires for your backlight are not behind the screen,
because, uh, there's not enough room back there once you put the backlight in, so, um,
the other thing is, uh, you need to make sure that, uh, the backlight, uh, I actually had to put some electrical tape
over the, um, the terminals on the backlight because I was afraid they were gonna short out against some of
the solder joints on the logic board.
So let me tell you right now: the screen is never going to have the contrast ratio that you would expect on a
modern LCD. However, having the backlight will make it far more tolerable to play compared to the way it came
from the factory.
OK, I told you there was gonna be some alternatives to doing this mod, and one of the easiest things you can
do if you don't mind the spending the money is just jump on eBay and buy a Game Boy Advance SP.
Now, they came in two different models, uh, one of them's actually front-lit and the other one is back-lit.
The last model is back-lit and these were the last Game Boys that can actually play the original Game Boy games,
as well as Game Boy Color games. Uh, once you jump up to the Nintendo DS, uh, they no longer have any
support for the old classic games. Another couple things you can do is, uh, of course you could obviously
download an emulator and play these games directly on a modern PC or Macintosh computer.
Um, there's some other people who have done some really crazy stuff like putting a Raspberry Pi inside of
a Game Boy, which is a pretty interesting little project, but, uh, something I'm probably not going to wanna
tackle myself. OK, so sometime in the near future, I plan on doing a similar modification to this Game Boy Advance,
And I'll come back and make another video about that. Um, also don't forget to like my videos
and subscribe to them; that's what tells YouTube that I'm doing a good job and not that I'm not making crappy
videos, so.
Uh, I hope you enjoyed this and I'll see you next time.
[Music]