Hi all, i just finished my SP pro sound and i thought i would share it all with you.
when the SP first came out i rejected it straight away, nintendo went and took the hard core gameboy and put an easy to break hinge on it. my experience with laptops taught me that hinges are the first to go.
but i bought one of ebay for the sake of trying out every gameboy nintendo have to offer, and recently i went back to it. now i have fallen in love with it! and like every new loving relationship i straight away started to hack and butcher my SP with dremals and other power tools.
first thing i noticed when opening it was the total lack of space. this gave me mixed feelings, i was glad nintendo were using all the space they could, but it left out all the moding posibilities. but i like a challenge so it was still a positive thing to see.
first of all i had to pick a space for the jack. as with all my mods i don't want to loose any features of the gameboy, so taking out parts is a no go, it must work exactly as it did before but better!
so i picked a spot just below the volume control but there was a stupid little capacitor in the way (goes between true ground and audio ground, it helps with heavy bass by acting as a power buffer)
so that had to be moved out the way.
then i needed to mod the case to fit the jack socket in. i used the jack socket from a pocket gameboy as i had it lying around, and it has a mute switch built in.
then i wedged in the socket, it has a nice fit so that it doesn't need gluing or anything and its still strong.
then a bit of wiring.
this was the real bitch. i found the pro sound points easy enough, they are even labled, but getting the internal speaker to mute was near enough impossible. the problem is that its not like a pro sound on a DMG, where the audio from the CPU is put through a parallel pot, it is run straight to the amp, and then the amp drags everything to ground when you turn the volume down. so it cant just be wired to the back of the pot because it doesn't work that way, and it cant be taken at the CPU because they are still attached to the amp and so the volume pot, and cutting the traces would loose the internal speaker.
the first contacts i wired to gave me pro sound, but it was still wired to the volume control so if i turned down the internal speaker it took the pro sound with it. so i chose some points a bit further back which were much louder but they took too much power (before the cap so no buffer) and it caused distortion on the screen. i might try again and see if i can adjust the power to the screen to make that a bit better,
so i had to use the first contacts again, but i now needed a way to mute the internal speaker, but the internal speaker mutes when the switch is connected to ground, where as in the older gameboys it was disconnecting from ground that caused the internal speaker to mute, and i am using a pocket headphone jack.
so i decided that because the pro sound is before the amp, i don't need the amp when using the pro sound. so i ripped up the ground pins on the amp and connected them to the internal switch in the headphone jack. that way everything acts as normal when there is no jack in there, but when the jack is inserted it breaks the contact from ground which cuts power to the amp, and in tern the internal speaker.
but this does give a weird effect where the pro sound is quiet until you turn the volume down on the SP, then the volume goes up on the pro sound. i think it has something to do with how the amp mutes by dragging everything low.
the final socket.
but i wanna know what you are doing with them!
i assume you don't have the cables, do you wanna take this to PM?
