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So help me out if you can here; I'm surfing eBay and local e-fleamarkets, but I don't know what to look for and what to watch out for when buying a GB or a GBC? Thanks.

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London, UK

some ideas:

check in the battery compartment that there's no signs of batteries having leaked (orangey-brown goop everywhere.

check the cartridge slot for rust.

take batteries and test it if they'll let you - if there are horizontal lines across the screen avoid, if there are vertical lines you can usually fix it if you have a soldering iron.

If you can take a cart, or they have one check the sound via headphones to see that a) it's in stereo and b) the volume pot isn't really, really crackly.

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London, UK

that's if you're at the fleamarket obvs, although a decent ebayer will send you a photo of the battery compartment I would think.

and the volume control thing doesn't matter so much  if you intend to pro-sound mod it before the volume pot

Last edited by Duck (Mar 5, 2019 12:42 pm)

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Thanks a lot!

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Philadelphia

First and foremost, if an online listing doesn't show pictures of the back, ALWAYS ask if it has the battery cover before buying. I personally ask if it has the ORIGINAL cover as many of these systems don't come with a cover at all or if they do, it's a replacement made from a different color of plastic. You may not mind having no cover but it can be an inconvenience if it doesn't.

Second bit of advice, buy from a Japanese seller. I've gotten the majority of my collection from Japanese sellers (who sell on the US eBay site) and they're usually in great condition, work perfectly, and they take a ton of pictures with the listing. Rule of thumb is if they have less pictures then they probably have something to hide!

And as a matter of preference, I would go for a DMG rather than a GBC. I just like the sound better, but either will work with most of the same peripherals - although a DMG link cable is usually harder to find than a GBC one and if you buy one of the clear color ones that link to both, they can often times be duds, from what I've seen.

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London, UK

And as a matter of preference, I would go for a DMG rather than a GBC

100% this.

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not jophish anymore
Duck wrote:

And as a matter of preference, I would go for a DMG rather than a GBC

100% this.

back when i wrote gameboy music, i recall always preferring actually writing on an MGB (gameboy pocket) for the sake of portability/feel, and then bouncing the finished track to my computer from a DMG since it obviously sounds much better.

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Brittany

If you plan to use nanoloop mono, you should look for a DMG. For everything else, gameboy pocket is fine with some EQ and denoise/notch filter, imho.