I Paid Only $30 for Pokémon Emerald - But It's In BAD Shape

I bought this Pokemon Emerald Game Boy Advance game for only thirty dollars from a viewer named Jason but that's because it's amazingly broken let's take a look this Pokemon Emerald game might sell for up to 230 on eBay so it's definitely worth fixing the viewer that I bought it from bought it from someone on mercari for a hundred dollars but he didn't know it was broken so unfortunately he got ripped off because he didn't know it looked like this inside oh boy this one is quite the mess this battery is barely holding on here a bunch of the soldering on this chip is no good and it looks like maybe even one of the legs have been torn off this chip needs to be re-soldered this I think that component's still there it's kind of hard to tell this needs to be re-soldered these guys uh look like they're barely there I'm not sure about that let's look at the other side of this game cartridge okay and we've got somebody tried to install a trace here but it's not connected to anything so that's not going to work very well got some solder here wow it looks like yeah this was Liquid damaged at one point okay I think we need to get under a microscope and have a better look at this so we know what we're dealing with so this looks like some of the worst part this whole part of the board has just been torn off and then they tried to run a wire from the battery over to these points here this point though is not even soldered on so I'm not sure the point of that this looks pretty bad we got one leg two legs that are torn off and that actually looks like this leg could be torn off as well that could be bad but I think maybe we'll be able to fix that I'll have to take a look at that in a minute here this soldering is just horrible same over here really bad this is very dry soldering you can tell because of these Peaks right here this pointiness and what do we have over here more just really bad soldering this component's like almost destroyed I think they might have been soldering without using any flux at all and even before they did all this work it looks like this board has been liquid damaged and this is the best soldering on this entire board I think the first thing we need to do is remove this battery take some of these chips off and have a better look at the board and then we can assess from there now I've got a soldering iron started up we've got our air filtration turned on now we're ready to put on some flux flux will just help this solder flow nicely and then we'll come through and start removing these chips like I said we're just going to do the main chips I don't think we need to be do to do all of them at this point but we'll see we might need to buy the end of this video I'm first going to start just by desoldering this wire right here I want to get this battery up first there we go good enough it's a big old blob of solder right here okay there we go now we can see oh man that just looks so bad I'm gonna use my hot air soldering station to remove this chip and then we'll get a look at the board also I'm going to get some of this solder off there's a ton right there to do that I'm just going to use a little bit of solder Wick and that will just Wick up some of this excess solder you can see it working its way up the braid that's the point of solder Wick after all of that we took off and there's still some here okay that's better now I'm gonna get my hot air soldering station started up and up to temperature I'm going to add some flux onto this chip and then we will remove the chip and see the condition of the Chip And the condition of the board underneath I don't have high hopes it looks pretty bad so far you've probably noticed me using iFixit Tools in this video along with basically every other video I make that's because I use them in pretty much every video I make iFixit tools are some of the best Precision Tools out there and they not only sell tool kits they sell parts in fact there's a few manufacturers that are selling OEM Parts through iFixit like HP Steam and several others so whenever you're looking for genuine OEM parts go to ifixit.com first and see if they have what you need if you already have the parts and tools you need and just need some help fixing your device iFixit is still a great resource because they have a huge question and answer section that covers most devices including cars and even clothes and in addition they have how-to repair guides as well as tear down guides for lots of devices I'm going to put a link to ifixit.comtronixfix right in the description that'll take you right there and very surprisingly the pads on the board itself actually don't look that bad I think these are actually all probably usable now the chip itself though we're going to have some issues with so clearly we have one issue right there it's a broken pin these are all bridged that's fine we can fix that the other issue is on this side we've got two more broken pins there's not much there to work with but I think I might be able to tack a wire onto these if I can't do that I should be able to sand this down a little bit and get a little more Exposed on these pins and once these pins are exposed a little more than I could for sure solder onto that but I might be able to do it just on this we need to clean this board up a little bit better so we can see what exactly is going on with all this liquid damage and if that's something we need to repair first before we worry about all these other things I think I will remove this other chip as well right here just so we can have a look under that and I'll probably also remove this chip too so we can look under that just so we have a better idea what's going on on this board let's remove those and then we'll inspect it more and create a plan so we've done a little bit of cleaning on the board but we need to do some more cleaning on these holes here and get any of this corrosion out and then do some testing and make sure that these circuit traces are good in here looks like most of the issues with liquid is down here or corrosion as we move up the board there it looks like there's less of it not really any of it actually so that's good I do want to scrape some of this off where I can see there's been corrosion underneath just to make sure that you know all the corrosion has been removed and there's no damage on the copper then we can come through with some conformal coating and coat that again to make sure the copper doesn't start corroding now on the back side we've got quite a bit of corrosion too all mostly looks looks okay as far as the Integrity of the circuits but we need to inspect all of this kind of stuff to make sure there's not a break in these circuit traces here I always feel bad when I get this stuff from people who were ripped off like on eBay or mercari or wherever Facebook Marketplace because it's so easy for sellers to just say oh yeah it works fine practically brand new and then to just ship it out now a lot of places I'm not I'm not clear on why the seller didn't go to mercari and get his money back but there's some reason that that didn't work and so he had it and wanted to send it in to me to see what I could do so if you guys ever have good stories like that just contact me on my website tronixfix.com I'm always looking for a good story so anytime you know if you've been ripped off or you know a repair shop tried to fix it but couldn't or you know Sony tried to fix it but couldn't anything like that is usually ends up being an interesting story so if you have stuff like that especially on interesting Electronics and contact me on my website and maybe we can work something out so I can make a video about it now I have this board pretty clean and we've gotten a bunch of the corrosion scraped off so what I'm going to do now is test each of these pins right here and make sure that there is continuity from the pen to the corresponding pin or pad or circuit Trace over here that'll just make sure that those connections and circuit traces are all good so right here we're going to go from here over here oh this is going to be easier if we just make it beep beeps okay good this one we don't have a corresponding uh pad anywhere on the board at least on this side so here we're gonna go up right there good what I'm doing here is checking to make sure that there is continuity from here over to here and there is this little spot right here that looks a little bit dark if there was a break right there then my meter would not beep good there good there good there okay so I'm gonna go through and check the rest of these off camera if I find one that has a problem then we'll film how to fix it okay and we've got it pretty clean and most of the corrosion removed so I think we're good to start rebuilding this board so one of the things we need to do is fix stuff like this all this this solder is just all over this capacitor I'm going to need to go through and check each of these pads and reapply solder onto each of these pads I'm going to need to reinstall this capacitor there's a capacitor that was attached to here and then over to here but this copper pad has just been totally worn away so I'm going to install the capacitor on this side and then see if it can reach over here and if not I'll install a jumper over here we need to redo all of this soldering this actually doesn't look too bad and then after that we can install this chip and then deal with the broken legs on that chip that's probably going to be one of the most difficult parts of this so we'll save that part till last get to redoing some of these components and some of this solder so the problem with this guy is that on the very end of it there should be metal on the end and that Metal's just been torn off so all we're left with is kind of the internal part of the resistor and unfortunately there's just not enough there for me to solder to so I'm going to see if I can get a good enough connection to see what this is rated at 0.8 ohms okay I'm going to look around and see if I have one that's maybe a little bit longer even and then we'll replace that we'll replace this resistor with that resistor okay and I did not find an exact resistor that matches that but I did find a fuse on a PlayStation 5. so it is significantly smaller but hopefully it'll work anyway it's rated the same so there we go and I mean I would assume that a fuse and a resistor kind of have some different characteristics that may be important but I also think it'll work just fine so we'll find out okay now that is installed that's actually really solid so now what I'm going to do is go through and fix these joints these joints all of these joints and all of these joints foreign ahead and knocked a resistor off while I was going there so let's try and get it put back on the board there we go oh almost not quite sometimes it's a larger iron it's hard to get the tip right where you need it to get the heat on there you need let's try the small one this one we can get right in there right where we want it okay good good [Music] there we go that's not going anywhere [Music] okay and now we have all that done it's time to reinstall the chips [Music] foreign we've still got two uh we still got one on this side and one on this side now this one is probably gonna be the hardest one there's just a little nub sticking out there so we gotta see if we can get anything soldered to that or not let's get some more flux over here there we go let's get all the coating off of this wire so we're gonna go down here like this okay that's kind of what we need but then we need to make sure that the top part is actually soldered to the pin up here is that okay and we got it well that was easy now we need to get the battery soldered on so I just finished with the game that one resistor that I replaced it actually was supposed to be a capacitor so I did fix that problem now let's start it up and see if this game works oh we got a Nintendo logo that's good news come on yeah everything looks great that was a difficult fix if you like this type of video and you want to see one where I tried to fix nine broken Pokemon Game Boy games I'll put a link for that video up on your screen now so you can come hang out with me over there and see if I can fix those don't forget to go to ifixit.comtronixfix if you need parts tools or just help trying to fix your device thanks again for watching today and I hope you have a good one foreign [Music]

Channel: TronicsFix

Views: 383,485

Keywords:

Id: teZmGlg6mTY

Length: 16min 55sec (1015 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 25 2023