Nov 24, 2013 How to repair Gameboy commom problems How to fix Nintendo Gameboy common problems. Recently, I came across a Gameboy at Goodwill for $6.99. While inspecting it I noticed the battery contacts where very corroded but the Gameboy was complete albeit very dirty likely from years of use and the lack of the previous owner taking good care of it.

2020 popular 1 trends in Consumer Electronics, Handheld Game Players, Replacement Parts & Accessories, Cases with Gameboy and 1. Discover over 19200 of our best selection of 1 on AliExpress.com with top-selling 1 brands. Shop the top 25 most popular 1 at the best prices! Mute speaker when headphones inserted. Most requested feature! Better fit for Game Boy Color if using original speaker. Game Boy Advance supported. Cool black color! Models supported. Game Boy DMG; Game Boy Color GBC; Game Boy Pocket GBP; Game Boy Advance GBA; Benefits. Main benefit is the sound volume, it's much louder than Game Boy internal amp.

Hay folks,
I got something to share:
This is a scan of the main logic board for the DMG 01. I had been wanting an image like this for a while, and decided to make it myself. I started removing components before I had the necessary equipment, so some things aren't as pretty as they could be, but I nit-pick.
My motivation for what became a massive project started when I saw some minor inconsistencies between the only information I could find (which is right here) and what I was seeing while reverse-engineering the poor gameboy you see to the left, but it was more than enough for me to get started. I'll explain more of my motivations later. But now you get to see the fruits of my labor!

(1890 x 1854, 6.13 MB)
Aaaand this is the back. Without the copper sticker of questionable purpose. (I'll have other quandaries some of you may be able to answer later.

(1890 x 1854, 5.82 MB)
Before I go any further, please know this is the first revision. Everything looks right to my eyes, but they may not be as trained as some of yours. Let me know what may need to be corrected.
The biggest thing I wanted when drafting these documents was transparency. I wanted all this to be understandable to someone with only basic understanding of what circuits are and how they work. I'll give a crash course later in this topic on how to read this schematic if you're having troubles.

(The rest of these images are a lot smaller than the photos, but at beautiful 3125 resolution - just so you can thoroughly appreciate the detail)

<smug> This is it, folks. All of it. Everything. All 80 hours of work, plus or minus (I'd rather not think about it). The usefulness of this image is less than the others because it's so detailed. But I must show the detail nevertheless.</smug>
This does give me the opportunity to tell you a little about the prints you're looking at (or whatever they're called in digital format).
Source: The gameboy I dissembled had an early production of the sixth revision of the CPU PCB. I know this because I am only the second owner of this gameboy. The gentleman I bought this from sold me his and his brother's, saying he had gotten his, from the store, soon after his brother had gotten his. His brother's has a revision five. I can spot a few differences between them, but they're small things that shouldn't matter.
Accuracy: The scans I made had some distortion because it didn't lay perfectly flat against the glass. I corrected this in Photoshop by re-distorting the image. I didn't get it perfect - as in: there's a total of 0.4mm of drift in the image, I hope you can deal with that. I did attempt to get things as accurate as I could. The initial draft followed the image to a minimum of 1/20th of a mm. I then went back through and took some liberties with spacing. There are only a couple places that bother me, but I doubt any of you are looking that closely.
Applicability: If you were to make this board as I've shown and soldered all the bits to it, would it work? Yes. Would it fit in your DMG case? Yes, but it'd be a little snug. Why did I do this? Haha, silence... I mean, science!

This is the more reasonable 'fully loaded' version. This shows just the traces of the front (in red), back (in blue), and silk screening (in white). The font isn't the same, because there's a level of absurdity even I can anticipate. I didn't split as many hairs with the silk as with the traces (the red/blue bits) - the purpose of this image is to cross reference the location and orientation of the components because I left the silk out of the rest of the plans for clarity. If you're not sure what the symbols, abbreviations, or values are - look for a crash-course later in this topic.

This is for general reference. Just the traces as seen from the front. I should note that the front is red, and the back is shown all 'x-ray' like in blue.

Because I know not everyone has spent the hours staring at this that I have, I anticipate some of you will still find the previous plan confusing, or only happen to care about one side of the board for some reason. This is the front, the whole front, and nothing but the front...

... and the back. This image shows the back as it is viewed from the back - not inverted as it is in the rest of the plans.

OK, now for some more technically relevant information. There are three major things I wanted to communicate with these plans. This is part of one of them: How power enters the circuit. The highlighted traces is the path from the positive terminal on the battery bay to the DC power jack. Why? Because there is an important break in the circuit at this point. When external power is provided via this jack, the gameboy is kind enough to stop sapping your batteries of their life juice. It does this by having a switch in the jack itself. That means that if you're modding your GB and want to draw power from somewhere, you can't draw it from this path if you're using the external DC jack. This is the type of thing I know I'd end up raging about if I needed to troubleshoot. That's why this is here.
(It might still work if you have batteries installed, but you run the risk of overheating/leaking/exploding/etc. the batteries depending on the configuration if you also have the external power plugged in. Something about messing with the chemical reaction occurring in the batteries. Just something to keep in mind.)

The second leg of the power's journey is shown here. The circuit at this point assumes it has power. It travels from the DC jack up to the switch that we all know makes the 'buh-ding' happen. That switch is an inverted 'single pole double throw' switch. Which means that when you flip the switch, two things are happening. When in the 'on' state, the switch completes the circuit between the bottom 2 pins, and only the bottom 2 pins. When it is 'off', it completes the circuit for the top 2 pins, and only the top 2 pins.
Then something interesting occurs. The power for most of the circuit leaves this board and runs off to another one (which I'm sure is the power regulator, but I haven't taken that apart yet). What's interesting is that this unregulated power runs off to the 2nd pin of the flex cable that goes to your screen's circuit board, and another part branches off to the 4th pin of the amp. So, yeah. That's a thing.

What I assume is the regulated power re-enters the board just a few holes below the point it left, and makes a highway-loop around most everything. This is where I recommend pulling power from, which is fairly convenient because it's mostly on the back, so it's easy to follow. Everything labeled VCC on the schematic comes directly from this.

As with every yin, there is a yang. For every high there is a low. Every positive, a negative. And for every VCC, there is a GND. As you can see, the grounding plain is quite sizable, so there you go. The VCCs and GNDs are the second thing I wanted to communicate with you folks. Have at it.

The third and final thing I wanted to show you is how the CPU gets the amp to make all the 'bleeps' and 'bloops' everyone here has come to love. Particularly so for the DMG. This is the left and right audio out from the CPU to capacitors 3 and 4, through resistors 5 and 6 and finally into the amp.

These last two images are really straight forward. This one is the path the left audio takes from the amp, off the board, and to the headphone panel.

And this is showing the right audio doing the same.
While you're looking, see if you can follow the trace from pin 3 on the amp to pin 20 on the flex cable socket going to the screen's board. That's the summed mono audio heading to the speaker on the bottom right of the gameboy.

So, yeah. That's about it for that. Enjoy!

Also, hi. I'm new here

Last edited by bit 9 (Aug 24, 2014 2:25 am)

Tube Headphone Amp

A leading technology company announces the next in its successful and long-standing line of handheld hardware. The new update sports plenty of long-awaited features, including an improved screen and a better battery. But it also includes one major omission: the standard 3.5mm headphone jack, which had been included on all of its portable products until this point, has been replaced by a proprietary standard. Many in the press are livid, and consumers largely react with confusion, but many shrug it off and decide to buy the product anyway.

This introduction could obviously describe the current brouhaha surrounding the release of the headphone jack-free iPhone 7 and 7 Plus. But you may not remember that it also describes Nintendo's release of the Game Boy Advance SP way back in 2003.

Nintendo's mid-generation revamp of the original Game Boy Advance didn't improve on the internal processing power of the core system. It didn't support any games that weren't also supported by 2001's standard Game Boy Advance. Still, the GBA SP drew interest as the first Game Boy to sport an internal battery pack (boasting 10 to 18 hours of continuous play) and the first to include a frontlit screen, for playing in dark rooms. It also sported a trendy flip-top design that protected the screen when not in use and made the unit easy to fit in a pocket.

But much like the iPhone 7, the GBA SP did away with the headphone jack that had been standard in the hardware line up until that point. To use headphones with the GBA SP, you had to buy a $5 dongle—not included with the $100 system—to plug into the EXT2 port, which was also used for charging the system (there were also custom-made headphones that plugged into the EXT2 slot directly). If you wanted to charge and listen to headphones at the same time, you had to invest in an awkward third-party solution, which should sound familiar to iPhone 7 watchers.

When questioned about the omission, Nintendo said the headphone jack was removed so it could pack the GBA SP's internal hardware into the system's relatively small case (another 'courageous' answer that will sound familiar to Apple watchers). iFixit's teardown shows just how packed the tiny GBA SP case is, and at least one modern modder was only able to fit a new headphone jack in there by removing the existing link cable port. Still, you could argue that making the unit a few millimeters wider or thicker would be worth it for the support of such a popular audio standard.

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Regardless, the reaction to the GBA SP's lack of a headphone jack in many corners of the press presaged the similar outrage surrounding the iPhone 7's lack of a headphone jack today. The section from Eurogamer's review quoted in full below probably wins the award for most righteous outrage by packing six 'whys' into a single sentence:

What more could you want? Well, a bloody headphone socket would've been nice, for starters. Unbelievably, after creating one of the finest pieces of gaming design known to man, Nintendo go and fleg (Flob, hawk, gob, spit) in our beer and forget to add one of the most essential parts of any portable gaming device. Apparently Nintendo will be selling a separate headphone port, that will plug into the Ext 2 port, but has yet to announce how much this will cost.

Gameboy Dmg Flipping Headphone Amp Replacement Battery

Why Nintendo, why why why why why? The speaker is just as tinny and pathetic as the GBA, and thus if you have any intention of playing a game with the sound on while in the presence of human beings around, you'll know that you'll get that glare. Try the same thing on a train or a plane (or better still, in a library) and your life won't be worth living. Headphone socket. Where the hell is it?

Eurogamer wasn't alone in its condemnation. IGN's reviewer cited the missing jack as 'the only real beef I have with the new design' and mentioned that 'I have a hard time believing that an 1/8-inch headphone jack and miniature headphone preamp couldn't be squeezed in.' Penny Arcade memorably featured the omission in a March 2003 comic that concluded 'Remember, it's only a crime to fuck kids if you're not a multinational corporation.'

Rage-filled reactions were easy to find in online gaming message boards as well. 'Seriously... How can you have a portable gaming device and not have a way for you to use a pair of headphones with it?' asked one commenter on the Rage3D forums. 'If it ain't broke, as they say, don't rip it off and put in something else—unless, of course, you're a soulless money-grubbing corporate monolith who wants to squeeze an extra $10 out of the loyal customers who just want what functionality they had before,' Ars commenter Polyester wrote in our own thread on the topic.

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Others were willing to downplay the omission, if not fully forgive it. 'If Nintendo can save space, make the unit smaller, and still allow people to connect their headphones if they want, then I’m almost happy,' Nintendo World Report wrote in a hands-on preview just before the launch.

While Apple can probably draw some lessons from the GBA SP's headphone removal, the situations aren't exactly the same. As important as headphones are for playing many Game Boy Advance games in public, Nintendo's handheld wasn't used for phone calls, music, podcasts, and the myriad other smartphone tasks for which headphones are often essential. On the other hand, the GBA SP existed before Bluetooth headphones were a relatively cheap and widespread alternative to the wired standard. And Apple includes both Lightning headphones and a Lightning-to-3.5mm adapter in the box with the iPhone, which ought to ease the transition for many.

Gameboy Dmg Flipping Headphone Amp Replacement Youtube

In any case, the lack of a headphone jack doesn't seem to have hurt the GBA SP much in terms of market impact (though the lack of any serious competition before 2005's PlayStation Portable may have something to do with that, too). The revamped system sold 43.52 million units worldwide, according to Nintendo, representing over half of all Game Boy Advance units ever made. Early pre-order sellouts for the iPhone 7 Plus model suggest a lot of smartphone buyers don't think the missing headphone standard is a dealbreaker either.

Still, following the GBA SP, Nintendo didn't develop a long-standing aversion to the standard headphone jack. The Game Boy Micro, released in 2005, managed to squeeze in the standard headphone jack despite a massive decrease in size from the GBA SP (a squint-inducing tiny screen helped on this score). Our own review of the Micro noted this inclusion as 'a huge relief to a lot of people out there' and something 'Nintendo should have been doing from the very beginning.' A headphone jack has also been present in every single unit on the subsequent Nintendo DS line as well.

That has made the GBA SP a historical oddity that was, for over 13 years, probably the most famous case of a device maker purposely doing away with the decades-old headphone jack standard. With the iPhone 7 definitively taking that crown, now is a good time to remember that this is a road that has been walked before.