Can This RARE Game Boy Color Be Saved?

hey guys Sean here so today I'm gonna try and see if I can fix up this Pokemon Center gameboy color I got this on eBay for about sixty one dollars I think and they actually like a really nice condition when they sell for typically almost three times that amount so I think if I clean this up I can get my money back and then some right now it this is the wrong battery cover but yeah right now it completely doesn't turn on at all and I'll go ahead and try that with a power adapter too just in case and yeah same thing so yeah I'm going to open this up and we're gonna try to fix it cosmetically but we also want to fix the actual hardware and get it running too so yeah let's get started even these screws are pretty gross it's really like stuck together okay so actually doesn't look too bad not not a whole lot of corrosion or anything let's just continue taking it apart the screen looks pretty good it's probably okay and I do have this replacement lens the colors are that quality of this one is actually really really good the colors are just very slightly different so I don't know if I'm gonna try to see if I can fix this or just put on this replacement one you probably won't be able to tell the difference but I know these are kind of rare but it's pretty badly damaged so I don't know I guess I'll take it off for now I'll just put it over here okay so I want to also I would remove this like plastic cover thing here it does keep out some dust a little bit but if I'm gonna be washing it and it's a good idea so to remove the battery terminal just push on this little bit here sometimes they're a little bit stuck I don't know about this sticker it doesn't really look that different so I might have a replacement that would be equivalent but I'll check on that later I'll leave it on for now and I guess I'll go ahead and remove the shield the shield doesn't look bad but I'm gonna go ahead and clean everything down to the screws well it's actually like broken glass in here that's very weird there's broken glass inside this game boy all right so here are all the parts I guess I'll clean this as well but I'm gonna go ahead and clean all these things I guess I'll use the original membranes isn't hard to clean them I might I might just use new screws because I have a lot of screws but here's everything else that I'm going to clean so let's go over to the sink [Music] okay so while the exterior is drying let's take a look at the interior here and actually that's really good okay it's actually kind of powering on off sometimes so it could just be a dirty power switch so let's actually start with that so the way I like to clean the power switch is by completely removing this top metal bracket and it's actually pretty simple so the power switch is made up of kind of three parts there's like this metal plate on the top there's a part that slides it's like a light brown and then there's like a brown plastic part the brown plastic is kind of the base and it's held together back here and then this metal piece folds over the side and then it has like these two little like Clips so these clips need to be pulled kind of outwards and then it kind of releases it so it could be pulled up so basically if you need to apply some heat here with their soldering iron and then pull on this little tab you need some really sharp you Coppell use like an exacto knife or like I'm using these really sharp tweezers so let's do that oh okay so it helps to add a little bit of solder to this because that sardars there's not very much there and it's kind of old so on this will just make it a little bit easier so start by heating up that area and there we go get it nice and hot and then you want to get tweezers right under that little tab [Music] yeah just like that it lifts up so there's one side of it now the other side is still connected but that's old that's a good start and so now we flip it over and pretty much the same thing I'm gonna go ahead and add a little bit of solder in John sometimes you can just kind of grab it from the top okay so I remember the orientation the flat side goes towards the switch and like the site has some little pokey things on it goes towards the CPU alright so set that there and now here's the actual switch and the switch has some little pins and we'll try and clean those very carefully but this is the main part that's this should be nice and shiny and right now it's really brown and ugly and you can see just how brown it isn't here already it's getting nice and shiny I'm sure all you guys watch the retro future and a lot of times what he does is he just kind of drips you doesn't remove the top plate you just kind of drip some alcohol in there and that could actually definitely help a lot too if you're worried about opening us up but actually not too difficult to open up I think starting to look pretty good and now for the actual little switch here these little like metal pin things they can actually like pop up out so you want to be really careful and just apply some and like kind of move an outward direction on each side see what's getting stuck yeah okay just set it back in there carefully and put your switch cover from the top you know this is gonna get pretty hot so you want to find something like your tweezers or something I guess the tweezers will work okay so you want to push down about up here so that those little tabs can click into place again but they obviously can't click into place until you add some heat to the solder hear a little sizzle from the alcohol bring up just like that nice and clipped into place just kind of rub it back and forth a little bit and see if that helps I'm gonna plug it in now okay I was powering on consistently now the speaker is pretty quiet and you can hear it kind of crunchy and I'll put it close to the speaker that crunchiness needs some more cleaning so the next thing we're gonna do is clean the headphone jack here the speaker's will acquire so it could either be that the speaker needs replacing or it could be also be these three capacitors and need replacing I'm not going to do that in this video so I'm just gonna clean up the speaker and clean the headphone jack and we'll see if that improves it at all the volume potentiometer here could also need a little bit of cleaning and I'm not gonna remove it completely so I'm just going to uh do you like with the retro future does Elliott and just drip a lot of alcohol in there both sides good and again that really does it does help it's not as good as room completely removing it and cleaning it but most of the time that's pretty much all you need to do okay enough for the headphone jack here there is when you insert headphones it's kind of hard to sleep so when you insert a pair of headphones it switches there's a little switch in here like this little piece of metal that moves like half a millimeter and it makes contact with this piece here and that that basically sorry madam and that basically sends the signal to either the headphones or to the speaker so a lot of times there can be some corrosion in between where that little metal piece is so if you take some headphones and plug them in and out you can kind of see the little piece of metal move and basically you want to clean inside there take an intermission okay so the best way that I've seen it definitely can't hurt to you know dump some alcohol in there but one of the best ways is just to get an exacto knife and kind of scrape you want to push it down into that piece of metal and just kind of scrape it that kind of scrapes off any of if there's any kind of corrosion or oxidation or whatever and a lot of times I found that this really really helps it's a really simple little thing so that's one thing and now this can actually sometimes cause like some buzzing and certain sounds because it's just like kind of clear plastic thing that kind of vibrates when the speaker plays so you want to very carefully clean this listen alcohol that's not really gross stuff all over it Brown speakers of magnet so or has a magnet in it so sometimes we'll find that there's like pieces of like iron or something and they won't come off because they're just like stuck to the magnet you just like move around but they don't kind of like this there's like some pieces here so these must be some kind of ferrous metal but okay so it's a that's pretty good start let's see if that improved speaker okay it's a little bit louder I don't hear any of that crunchy sound anymore so yeah I think that I think it's a pretty good start let's attach the screen and see if your screen is okay I assume the screens okay but you never know I guess I'll go ahead and attach a game you know contacts could be dirty so I actually have a little cleaning kit thing you basically just done add some alcohol in here plug that on TV you can just drip alcohol in there too but this kind of helps a little bit you can also like put alcohol in the contacts here and then push it in and out a few times that should help there we go looks really nice and clean okay so that's looking pretty good I'm gonna just you know there's this little potentiometer down here you can actually access this through the back of the shell underneath this little thinkin and that's to adjust pretty much the contrast there you can see how it changes so bad there as as bright as it gets okay so that's looking really good so I think everything on the internal side is good now I'm definitely gonna clean up clean all these contacts with some said alcohol there's always some like leftover old like flux that's like dry it up on here and I always like to clean that off just give everything a good clean alright let's take a look at the the shell so just scrubbing it kind of didn't really do a whole lot definitely looks better but there's some really bad I almost wonder if this was in like some really bad car accident or something cuz there's broken glass this almost looks like like road rash there's some like cut pieces in it all over I'd be kind of sad if this was like so for some of these things I'm just gonna try to like there really is no better way to fix this as it then kind of cutting it off so if you just carefully cut it it might help to heat it up slightly but you also see here like the Nintendo logo there's like a cut right in the end I'm using a brand new blade here but this just takes a lot of really fine going over it and so for stuff like this like this kind of Road Rash sometimes it helps to mean excrete if I gonna spend like a lot of time off-camera just kind of going over and over very carefully you can kind of see how in this one spot doing right here it's already clearing up and you wanna be careful not to scratch it obviously you're just kind of like scraping over the topmost layer but see that already kind of helped a little bit so it actually looks quite a lot better there's still some pretty deep scratches but overall it's like quite a bit better I'm pretty happy with how it's I was turning out so far I think I am been replaced this pretty badly damaged it does say Game Freak right here which it's kind of unfortunate I went through all of my stickers have a big giant collection of them and this is a closest when I can find this one's really close to an original sticker except it doesn't say Game Freak down here but it's probably better for it to look nice and clean rather than all torn up and messed up like this see I think I'm gonna replace the rear sticker and the lens so yeah let's do the sticker now I'm just gonna use my nail here okay came out nice and clean okay just clean the screen delicately so the buttons actually cleaned up pretty well - here's the a and B buttons good pretty nice and the d-pad looks pretty good and I cleaned up all the membrane yeah pretty much all the internal screws are in good shape he's travelling series on these all all new ones here [Applause] okay this does have a film on it so that is looking pretty good okay and now let me check if I have a battery cover so I do but the only one I have is pretty dark I don't know but better than clear clear is kind of interesting I think this is an OEM clear this is an aftermarket blue so maybe I'll just stick with the clear I don't think it's too bad that ain't it it's uh let's give this a go [Music] of course it's not backlit but yeah it's still a very nice console so yeah I think it might be interesting if I actually put this back up on ebay and see what I get for it I will of course be upfront about the replacement sticker and lens and that it doesn't have an original battery cover of it but yeah I think it looks way better than it did in the beginning I'll do a here's a little before and after so yeah I guess that's it for this one you guys I will see you next time [Music] [Applause] [Music] Oh [Applause]

Channel: esotericsean

Views: 1,126,247

Rating: 4.8430529 out of 5

Keywords: gameboy color, gameboy color repair, game boy no sound, gameboy color not turning on, pokemon center gameboy color, rare gameboys, gameboy modding, esomods, esotericmods, bennvenn, kyleawsm, the retro future, lets refurb, retro gaming, game boy

Id: qi69B0HI7Hg

Length: 26min 2sec (1562 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 05 2019