I picked up a clear DMG at a local flea market, and the power LED was missing. I tried soldering in a new simple LED and it's not lighting up! It looks like someone cut out a resistor and what I think was a capacitor(?) just above it. I messed it up trying to solder the new LED on too, and now it looks like a piece of film that was between the original solder and the PCB is lifting up? The DMG still works, I just think I may have ruined any chances for an LED 
Has anyone ever replaced their power indicator LEDs?
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matt's mind
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.
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kitsch wrote:
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!
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Matthew Joseph Payne
It's interesting that you found a modding attempt at the flea market - this is the first time I've heard of that happening. Could we finally be reaching critical mass of modded vs. unmodded gameboys?
Where was the flea market?
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St. Louis
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.
Last edited by Pugbath (Apr 12, 2012 7:28 pm)
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Milwaukee Area, WI
kineticturtle wrote:
Could we finally be reaching critical mass of modded vs. unmodded gameboys?
I suddenly feared a future where all DMGs are modded.
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Pugbath wrote:
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.