MY HANDHELD BLOG

Repairing my Gameboy.

September 6, 2024

I thought it would be easy.

I have this old Gameboy lying around that used to be from my grandmother but she gave it to me a long time ago. Now I am not the person for being sentimental actually, I have been thinking should I sell it off to someone who have more fun with it then me, because the last 6 years at least it has been eating dust. So, I put it up for sale online. Somehow, I don’t know why it just felt wrong. Later I thought I would customize the Gameboy with a pink shell. That also turned out to be a different story.

With the batteries in the Gameboy and the games that I still had I turned on the Gameboy. I mean what could go wrong I thought. I can tell you I was very wrong about that. The screen turned on no problem, but there was something very strange, I got some weird pixels on the screen where the Gameboy logo supposed to be. Maybe the cartridges were dirty? So I did what we did when we were kids blew into both the Gameboy and cartridge since mostly that would solve all the problems and tried again.

The same problem was still there. I knew that the games worked when I sold off my Gameboy advance SP last year. I tested them so they could not have died in that small time. As I tried the games again after cleaning the cartridge pins with some 100% alcohol. Nothing changed. The weird thing was that if I started it up with no game in the Gameboy, I would have the normal black bar. This got me thinking maybe the games were the problem.

In the end I got myself a rom hack game. Pokémon Creepy Black off the internet thinking that maybe a new game would solve the problem. Have you heard about Pokémon Black from creepy pasta? It is one weird game you play as a ghost and I believe devour Pokémon. I have known about this one for as long as I can remember but honestly never actually played it. I thought now would be a good time to give it a try.

The cartridge arrived and I put it into the Gameboy, but the same weird pixels appear on the screen again. What could be wrong with the Gameboy then? So, I decided to open it up and see if there was any hidden dust in the cartridge reader. Cleaned it out as far as I could and gave it another try. Same results. This was such a bummer. I mean I wasn’t planning on buying another one since I wanted this one to work. I mean my only other idea was that the motherboard could be broken, but I am no expert..

This wasn’t how I want it to end for my Gameboy, I found someone online and contacted this person asking if there was anything I could do. Secretly I wanted to solve the problem myself. He gave me some cleaning tips for the motherboard and I tried that, but with no results. The only option left for me was to send it to this person and he would check it out for me and would let me know what the problem is for my Gameboy . . .

To be continued

Till the next blog everyone

Alexia