BFAD
Offline
Seattle, WA

So I had taken a Nonfinite V3 backlight out of a DMG that I'm pretty sure I messed up the ribbon cable connecting the two PCB's pretty bad and went to go install it on a Game Boy Pocket that I have. I get the backlight installed and now it does this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSqH77srdew

So it "POST"s and I can hear the startup sound, but no Nintendo logo (or lack thereof) appears and the screen is split in half by a column of pixels.

I've also successfully backlit a red Pocket with the same version of backlight and it turned out perfectly. I'm really hoping I didn't mess up the ribbon cables on this Pocket too, but I wouldn't be surprised at this point.

Aeros
Offline
Savannah, Georgia

i'm no expert, but that's gotta be a ribbon cable issue. i don't have apeshit's post for fixing this kind of stuff handy...
edit: aha! there are several solutions on part 3 of apeshit's post on this thread: http://chipmusic.org/forums/topic/6324/ … ing-guide/

Apeshit wrote:

Screen has distortion

This generally happens during backlighting, but can happen from disassembling the DMG if you're not careful. Especially on play it loud DMGs, because the adhesive to attach the LCD to the case is stronger.

Generally, this is from ripping the solder connections underneath the LCD from lifting it too high. It's fixable sometimes by carefully re-soldering it.

Apeshit wrote:

Screen has dead lines of pixels

If your screen has vertical lines, you can fix this by following these steps:

Remove the black rubber strip over top of the brown ribbon cable directly under the LCD
Remove as much adhesive as possible. This is usually pretty easy.
Turn the unit on, and crank the contrast so that the pixels all turn black
With a soldering iron add a bit of solder to the tip and gently apply heat under the areas with dead lines. Pressure is not necessary.

If your screen has horizontal lines, you're probably out of luck. There's no known fix, as the ribbon cable for horizontal lines isn't quite as "heat-friendly" as the one for vertical lines.

Last edited by Aeros (Aug 15, 2012 6:45 am)

BFAD
Offline
Seattle, WA

Yeah, it's probably like I feared. I was really hoping I wasn't gonna be out of my 2nd DMG AND its backup, lol. Time to hunt on Ebay soon I suppose.

Thanks though, I appreciate the help.

Last edited by BFAD (Aug 15, 2012 6:53 am)

Aeros
Offline
Savannah, Georgia

i'd personally wait for someone to reply who actually knows what the hell they're talking about

zerolanding
Offline
Easton, PA, USA
BFAD wrote:

So it "POST"s and I can hear the startup sound, but no Nintendo logo (or lack thereof) appears and the screen is split in half by a column of pixels..

I had something like that happen whilst backlighting a pocket. Turned out I sliced the ribbon cable on the back when I removed the foil. Drove me nuts, but I did fix it. See if that's what happened, if so, then attempt to put pressure on the cable and see how much screen comes back. Pressure was the key to that fix in my case. had to put the original foam directly under the slice and screw the case back up. not a problem since, but I should probably never take it apart again. Good luck.

BFAD
Offline
Seattle, WA

Thanks zerolanding, I'll give it another go when I get home. Those ribbon cables are ridiculous -_-

GoingHam
Offline
Chicago

Firstly I'd like to take into account that I have absolutely no experience or knowledge of the 'Gameboy Pocket'. Despite that I'd assume their fairly similar, so hopefully there will be something of use to you in this post.


I've encountered an identical problem twice very recently with my DMGs.
Here was the situation I was in
DMG1: The ribbon cable &/or the female cable connecter solder points were at fault
DMG2: The ribbon cable is very touchy and glitches until held in a very certain position
DMG3: Still kicking

I'll start with DMG2 as it was the easier of fixes. The pins on the ribbon cable had small scratches from where the metal had been etched away where they make contact with the innards of the port. Ergo, the lack of available metallic surface became to significant for certain pin/s to function properly. My first thought was to solder the recesses in the ribbon cable pins. This procedure kinda sucks, too much solder on the any one of the pins can easily result in the cable being to thick...
At this point in time, an ingenious thought had presented itself too me. The ribbon cable's pins are excessively longer then needed. I simply cut the pins right along where the etches began making sure to cut evenly so the cable wouldn't fit in sloppy or crooked. After reinserting the cut cable back into the port the screen worked like new again.

Now for DMG1, I went a little overboard with the soldering iron that day. big_smile

Same issues as DMG2, except the cable port wasn't sending any screen data at all not even a glitch, and the ribbon cable had even more problems. So with nothing better to do and a lot of time and patience on my hands I went to the next logical step to solve both issues by the mess of wires you see above. After completing all that wiring and verifying my solder work, too my surprise the thing actually came back to life.

I wouldn't recommend doing the latter of the two repairs.
Sadly though after that whole entire process, I look through my drawer and find a perfectly intact DMG ribbon cable I had salvaged a while back. I replaced the wire mess for the new found cable but was ultimately shut down as I seem to fuck up either of the vertical/horizontal cable that connect the screen to its PCB.

[Note: The plastic housing for the screen was melted ended up replacing after the picture also the display worked fine in the last picture. I didn't have an extra backlight so what your looking at is the torn off reflective and polarization layer that I placed back behind the glass.]

Telerophon
Offline
Austin, Texas
GoingHam wrote:

Firstly I'd like to take into account that I have absolutely no experience or knowledge of the 'Gameboy Pocket'. Despite that I'd assume their fairly similar, so hopefully there will be something of use to you in this post.

The game boy pocket is a lot closer to the game boy color from a circuit board layout perspective. I don't know much about them either, though. hmm

12ianma
Offline

It's basically a DMG fitted onto a dual sided pcb using more modern components and new processor. it is a similar layout to a gbc, but functionally (down to how buttons work) it is much more like a DMG.

My guess is that the screen is shot, or you have a short

Theta_Frost
Offline
Milwaukee, WI

This is why we need newly produced GB PCB's.

BFAD
Offline
Seattle, WA
Theta_Frost wrote:

This is why we need newly produced GB PCB's.

I'm on board with that. I coulda sworn that Nonfinite or someone else was looking into finding a PCB printer or something...but it's been a while and I forgot what was happening with that...

But yeah, I was going to try GoingHam's way on the DMG that I was experiencing something similar on, since I've got a few IDE cables I could rip apart but the soldering iron I have has the chunkiest tip ever...not exactly the best for so many tightly spaced points. I did try to mess with the ribbon cable some more just a bit ago on the Pocket, but it's too difficult to pinpoint where the break is occurring.

It's so funny because DMG's and MGB's aren't exactly as cheap as they used to be, but still fairly cheap...and I still can't even afford that right now tongue

I'm just gonna hang on to these corpses for parts while I save up for new ones. Thanks everyone for your help!

BFAD
Offline
Seattle, WA

So I fixed a DMG GoingHam style...almost. I'm just having some D-pad issues. It seems to not respond at all. I know it's messy and I'll figure out how to get it back in the case but I take it the ribbon cable also handles the input as well right? Actually it appears to just be d-pad left.

Last edited by BFAD (Oct 13, 2012 1:43 am)

zerolanding
Offline
Easton, PA, USA
Theta_Frost wrote:

This is why we need newly produced GB PCB's.

I believe Kitsch is working on that. It was on his thread awhile back...

uXe
Offline
Melbourne, Australia
zerolanding wrote:
Theta_Frost wrote:

This is why we need newly produced GB PCB's.

I believe Kitsch is working on that. It was on his thread awhile back...

Yes, I found this tantalising mention of it here:

http://chipmusic.org/forums/post/112683/#p112683

but nothing since... updates, kitsch?!

GoingHam
Offline
Chicago
BFAD wrote:

So I fixed a DMG GoingHam style...almost. I'm just having some D-pad issues. It seems to not respond at all. I know it's messy and I'll figure out how to get it back in the case but I take it the ribbon cable also handles the input as well right? Actually it appears to just be d-pad left.

Props for giving my little experiment a shot!
I did another frankenboy with smaller wires then previously used but both were impractical to be fitted in any shell.
Do you have any dead or horizontal lined front boards?
It is possible to transplant a working ribbon cable into another front board with display still attached.
There is something like 21 solder points connecting the cable to the board.
Ideally you'd want a solder sucker, helping hands, magnifier perhaps, a good soldering iron, a good source of light.
I have revived one of mine this way and it ended up fixing the thing entirely.
Also on another note if you wanted to make the wiring a bit neater and more manageable try finding an old sata cable to splice apart.

kitsch
Offline
matt's mind
zerolanding wrote:
Theta_Frost wrote:

This is why we need newly produced GB PCB's.

I believe Kitsch is working on that. It was on his thread awhile back...


nearly done.  its time to start thinking about the backlight color for the first run even.  i'm sort of stuck on green unless someone can change my mind...