One pin from your pot should be connected to 5v and the other is connected to pin 3 of the LTC1799. Use a 10k resistor between the pot pin(the one that is not connected to 5v) and pin 3 of the LTC1799.

Update: I sent it off to an expert (12ianma). it no longer crashes, has glowing silicone buttons, and now i have the option of turning off the variable clock. It seems he put a new speaker in it as well! This is now the coolest dmg in the entire world.

i dunno its on a larger board. i think it is from china. maybe a different batch. I said screw it and reconnected everything in my dmg the way i had it. just cant turn it too fast...it cuts out then.

I have no idea how to picture this. The thread was posted in Nintendo Handhels, so I' assume' you are working with a gameboy, correct?

What do you have wired up? Is the LCT powered, did you remove the internal clock, did you wire up the LTC to the gamboy yet? Did you read the datasheet? I swear, you make it sound like you are just soldering the potentiometer to random screens in your house.
Anyhow, the gameboy cannot handle nearly half of the frequencies that the LTC can produce, so what have you done with pin 4 on the LTC chip?

everywhere i put it scrambles the screen(as soon as i turn the 500k pot) or powers it off

i cannot read schematics.

Reading is helpful...
http://cds.linear.com/docs/en/datasheet/1799fc.pdf

there is no data sheet this is an old kind

Read the datasheet. They always have example schematics.

title says it all. what do I do? I have some resistors i harvested...