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What did you do this week (and weekend)?
As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their week. Did you accomplish any goals? Suffer a failure? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!
Flew to New England for my cousin's wedding. I landed in Boston, was picked up by my aunt (who flew in from Oregon) with my cousin, spend the weekend in his city, then spent Sunday night in Boston, and went to Paul Revere's house before my flight home. Everywhere I went in New Hampshire was absolutely beautiful.
I also got a free-standing pullup bar that is too big for my apartment (my family has a lot of crap, so I can't stand it up fully), but I'm making it work.
I modded a Gameboy Color to have a larger, backlit IPS screen, and a rechargeable lithium battery, both using the kits from funnyplaying. Installation wasn't too bad for the most part, but there's some super finicky soldering, especially for the power board that adapts the GBC's original power port to work with the supplied 5V USB adapter to charge the lithium battery. I dunno what it is, but I just seem unable to get the hang of soldering, even after hand wiring whole keyboards before, takes me forever to get the solder to go where I want it and the joints are usually crap.
Regardless I was eventually able to plod my way through the handful of solder points the project required, and it was so worth it, that display is literally one of the prettiest I've ever seen, incredibly bright and vibrant, it'll change your whole perspective on the Gameboy color; never realized how much it and most of the rest the Gameboy line were held back by their screens.
Unfortunately my idea to add wireless charging seems to have been a bust at the moment, my coil might just be bad or something, but I couldn't get it to receive power when nestled on top of the battery in the compartment. I may revisit that later since I have literally no idea what the problem was, the coil works when outside the case, even up to a decent height above the pad, and the case is just plastic and shouldn't be interfering with the coil. I'm also thinking of Bluetooth audio, but that'll involve some more soldering and necessitate installing a button and switch somewhere, so I'm not really feeling it at the moment.
This is super cool to read about. Do you have pictures of what the display looks like post-changes? Gameboys were just before my time but I spent many hours playing the Pokemon Sapphire and Emerald cartridges on my DS and have been looking for authentic copies ever since with no luck.
Pics.
Dunno how well it's conveyed in the images, but it's incredibly bright, clear, and vibrant, and about 25% bigger than the original (less bezel). The kit I got came with a custom shell and I went with the NES style one because it looks awesome. Nintendo logo and text under the screen is RGB backlit but I keep it red.
It's funny, that's basically my experience forward a generation! The GBC was a little before my time but I played a bunch of GB and GBC games on my GBA, and they're still the ones I have the most fond memories of, especially Pokemon Silver, TCG, and Link's Awakening, though I played a ton of Sapphire too.
I love playing games on original hardware (displays too ironically, except on handhelds) but I've honestly lost interest in acquiring original media, the prices on old games these days are crazy, especially on obscure hardware like the Sega Saturn. So mostly I use flash carts or disc emulator boards if I didn't already own the games. Reproduction cartridges can also be a good route, I picked up reproductions of Earthbound and Chrono Trigger for the SNES for like $15 apiece. There's also some wonderful consoles like the PS1, PS2, PSP, Dreamcast, Wii, and the Saturn that can be soft modded to natively play either burned discs or ISOs off standard expandable storage. Amazingly, the universal PS1 soft mod was only discovered last year!
That looks great!
Are these kits sold somewhere online? And you mentioned soldering in your original comment, is that something you’ve picked up as a hobby or do you have (is there any?) formal education in it?
Yeah, I’ve seen the recreated cartridges but I’ve never gotten one. I suppose I let my nostalgic purism get in the way of just enjoying it. I say this while sitting on an unfinished copy of Alpha Sapphire (from 2014!? What happened to all that time?). Used games are stupid expensive, the few original Sapphires or Emeralds I’ve found were going for hundreds of dollars. No way I could justify that.
All a self taught hobby, I'm not even really sure where you'd go to get an education in hobbyist electronics (but that sounds awesome). And yeah, this is the screen and case kit I ordered, battery mod was from the same site.
One tip I've got if you're dead set on original media is buying an old cartridge that can't save due to a dead battery. Instead of flash memory, old cartridges used a bit of RAM kept alive by a watch battery to save, usually a CR2032 or 2025. Really simple and cheap to replace, and by now I think most gen 1 and 2 carts should be dead, and gen 3 can't be far behind.
That said though, where were you looking? A quick ebay search shows Sapphire carts between $50-100, even with the batteries working or replaced.
Thanks for the link, the question is now whether I should add another hobby to the "to learn" list only to abandon later, hmm. I have to be honest, it's been so long I don't remember where I was looking but $50 to 100 is not that bad, I think.