I'm not positive, but it sounds like they probably used one of the old 2xled style backlights, which required the removal of the power led and ran off of its power. If you plan on keeping the old backlight in tact, you may have to do some customizing to get ar power led in there.

It looks like it had an old one from nonfinite, which extended to the left a bit. I replaced it with one from kitsch and now there is almost no plastic frame around the screen hahaha.

Could we finally be reaching critical mass of modded vs. unmodded gameboys?

I suddenly feared a future where all DMGs are modded.

Where was the flea market?

you need to replace R1 with a resistor appropriate to the color of LED you are using.

the film that is lifting up could possibly be the ground plane, i don't have a PCB in fron tof me to check and see what it might be...  too much heat will cause the layers of a PCB to come apart like that

its easy to replace though.  just switch out the LED, and change the value of R1 if you need to do this.  thats it, if you are modding a stock gameboy.

Thanks! They had a backlight in it, but it wasn't done very well. I didn't really help much by switching it with one from your store but it's a better light at least! I'll give this a go when I get home, thanks again!

the film that is lifting up could possibly be the ground plane, i don't have a PCB in fron tof me to check and see what it might be...  too much heat will cause the layers of a PCB to come apart like that

its easy to replace though.  just switch out the LED, and change the value of R1 if you need to do this.  thats it, if you are modding a stock gameboy.