i am making an inconspicous case to hold any contraband i may or may not have.

Condom dispenser.
Make it into a bomb.

I mentioned this to my friend and they showed me this:

1. http://www.flashingleds.net/gameboyLCD/gameboyLCD.html

2. http://www.flashingleds.net/nintendosco … scope.html

He's outputting the screen data to an oscilloscope using a microcontroller, it should be totally possible to LED matrix or some other kind of LCD display. I don't have a fast enough micro but maybe one day!

I'm serious! If I had extra DMG cases I'd try it rightaway...

I would absolutely love to make a new display to give it new life! I wonder how easy it would be do to? Probably a bit out of my depth since I've not done much hardware but it's fun to think about.

I counted 20 channels on the ribbon cable that connects the back PCB to the front, not sure what each channel is: my best guess (and this might be completely wrong) would be one channel for all the pixel data (rough calculation: 160x144 pixels with 2 bits per pixel depth being displayed at 59.7Hz would come out to 2,750,976 bits per second) and a couple channels for things like v-blank, h-blank as well as audio and the button inputs.

The flexible PCBs that the LCD is connected to the board through have a couple decoder chips (serial to parallel maybe?) for vertical and horizontal lines, maybe it'd be an option to desolder that and connect the matrix up to there instead of trying to decode through the ribbon cable.

if you have one of the later dmg-cpu (blobs) use it for recording. supposedly they have the best sound

i might try that... i have lots of empty cases

what about making a new display with led matrices? always wanted to see something like that

Not that close...

You want to close to the screen.

I'll take the back PCB and you can keep the rest.

Empty it, put something behind the screen protector acting as a light difussor and a big LED inside. Power it up with USB. Ultra cool desk light for less than 5 bucks!

Yeah I wasn't sure of the right place to do it. I started out really carefully and had no effect, so the next days I tried in different places and with a hotter iron.

It looks like you were using the soldering iron in the wrong area...

It looks like you were getting super close to the screen.

I don't want to let go of it, I'd like to find a use for it but I'm just lacking ideas at the moment.

but really I don't think you want this DMG, I tried (and failed) again to fix the lines and realized you can see the traces if you lift it up.. here's what I see:

So I don't think it's fixable without a replacement flexible pcb part or combined pcb + lcd (but maybe not needed since there's no missing horizontals) and of course neither of these can be bought anywhere..