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