Secrets To Fixing Faulty Game Boy Games!

Gameboy only from Nintendo now you're playing with power or the power ah the Gameboy a handheld that needs no introduction being born in the mid 1980s I got to experience firsthand the illustrious wonder of this small machine while it was well within its prime I can still remember the adrenaline rush from taking my gameboy to school battling and trading jinhwan Pokemon with my friends in the back of the class all while being careful not to flash it around our teachers otherwise it was game over I love this handheld and I'm frequently asked if I can revive a gameboy cart that's completely dead or replace a battery to get a game to save again well today we're going to go over several methods of how not only to repair what would otherwise be considered a dead Game Boy cartridge but we're also going to look at how we can change a dead battery to get those games to save again and to get back into the game let's get started now today we're going to be looking at two different Game Boy games the first game we're going to look at is my original childhood copy of pokemon red this game no longer boots and the safe battery was long long for the wind several years ago so I know it doesn't save anymore but now it also doesn't boot so I'd like to try to fix that and we're also going to look at this copy of Zelda Oracle of Seasons because this uses a much smaller CR battery and we're gonna replace it too because there's a few little things I'd like to make note of so let's start with the pokemon red here and we'll just start by putting it in this Gameboy just to make sure I'm not crazy and yes we have the glitch screen here and this is really all it does the game doesn't initialize properly in the bootrom and it's not able to read the code and match it with what's in the bios here so this this ASCII character Nintendo this ASCII set of characters that's basically how the Gameboy authenticates it reads these characters from memory on the game cartridge and it runs it against the same code effectively in the BIOS ROM on the Gameboy and if it matches it boots if it doesn't it doesn't match it doesn't on boot so having said that let's go ahead and let's take this apart and let's get into let's get into talking about how do you fix these things Gameboy carts that fail to boot is a really anything you can do well guess what seven or eight out of ten times there is something that you can do and we're gonna do it let's go okay so we've taken our screw out here let's just pop the top off and the board looks fairly normal nothing looks remarkably wrong here everything looks pretty good the battery obviously as we said before is is is well spent and as thoroughly dead actually look this this this battery has a date coat of date code looks like June of 99 my god so this is about yeah this is this is really old 19 years so having said that let's let's take this out and let's talk about first of all why do these games sometimes fail to boot and why don't they just stop working when that means that could mean anything from the the gibberish Nintendo logo it doesn't get past that or the screen might be white or full of characters if it does boot well more often than not if it's not a bad if it's not a bad mask ROM which is this is the actual mask ROM memory of this game what happens is is these Game Boy cartridges are on such a thin PCB substrate and actually I want to get my calipers out here just to show you guys how thin this is so let me just use zero these bad boys out here okay that's good enough I'm just gonna come in here we're just want to do a little quick measurement here just to see how thick these games are and we could probably round that up to maybe a millimeter at the most that's a really thin flimsy substrate that's a very thin two layer PCB and as you can see I'm not I don't want to damage this but this is very easily flexed and what can happen is is after hundreds or tens of hundreds or tens of trillions ilion's cycles that you put this into a gameboy and you cycle this cartridge in and out in and out in and out like this in and out Oh what happens is these solder joints here on the mask ROM and in other places they can fatigue they can become weak they can become brittle and they break so the first order of business is don't get out the multimeter don't start buzzing continuity to make sure everything's connected screw all that get right to the solar and let's reflow these pins and I always start with the mask ROM because it seems to be this this chip here and the location and the way the board flexes when you take things in and out this chip has the most tendency to to fatigue these joints the joints are most opposed to take it seems in my experience in this area so we're going to start with the mask ROM and we're going to reflow this we're going to reflow this mask ROM and then we're going to immediately test so let's let's do that now and I'm going to use my Mikey series tip here is just a nice knife edge I'm going to zoom in here and we're going to reflow this chip and we're not going to do them all we're gonna do them one by one and we're going to start with this chip we're going to do a reflow and then we're going to test so let's zoom in and let's do that now okay guys I hope resume didn't well enough here I'm just going to take my case here he's knife edge tip want to load up some solder not too much but not too little just a nice little nice little float of solder there that'll live on the edge of that tip and now what I'm going to do is I'm gonna take some of my no-clean and I'm just gonna run it across these pins like so that way we get some good wetting action and I hope this stays in focus and I hope that you guys can see what I'm doing here but I'm just going to do a little dragging technique or I want to put press firmly down on the chip I'm just gonna come in here we're gonna do a sweep away want to sweep away want to sweep away and we're gonna we're going to leave the iron on these pins just long enough so that you know capillary action will take place and we'll get Thor a wedding and then I'm just gonna do some dragging after I do a little bit of you sweep so I'm just gonna start doing some dragging I'm just gonna go down the way I'm just gonna reflow this as well as we can there we go just drag away very fast okay nice little sweeping motion okay that sides done that's look we can there's a lot of light in here but I think I think that's pretty it's pretty viewable there oh yeah for sure so we've flowed this side I'm just going to swing this bad boy around like so I think that's a pretty good shot I think you'll be able to see this maybe even better so I'm just gonna come on this side again with no clean a bead going down those pins I want to clean off my tip I'm going to reapply solder right here to the knife edge fantastic and we're just going to do the same thing on the other side so here we go let the heat travel give it some time I'm just going to do some sweeping sweeping go down the line and sweep great now I'm going to clean my tip off because I just now I'm only interested in moving what solder I have delivered to the pins around to the pins without adding any more solder so now I'm just gonna do my dragging nice and easy all the way down just like that beautiful see if we can make that a little clearer for you to see oh yeah it looks fantastic so now that we've refloat the mask ROM let's go ahead and stuff it back into the Game Boy cartridge and let's put it in this Game Boy Advance courtesy of Steve cool off and let's see if this game boots let's do it all righty so we're just want to take our Game Boy PCB here and put it back in the nice pokemon red housing like so and we're not gonna put the screw in there because we want to make sure but first we've got to do the battery but we wanna make sure that we're good we very well might have to reflow other chips so let's do it hot dog there it is and we're booting and we're working just fine so let's go in here and let's just see yeah see new game so the battery is absolutely dead and the good news is if you provide this dead Game Boy cartridge here Pokemon Reds working now the the fun part was over now the second the fun part is removing this battery now let's talk about batteries for a moment a lot of these older cartridges use a 2025 a cr2025 battery I personally like to use a cr2032 battery it's the same voltage and it's a little bit bigger in real estate in terms of its size but because it's bigger and has a higher capacity and it'll last just that much longer so we're gonna remove this battery and we're gonna replace it with a CR 2032 again this is a cr2025 we're gonna swap it with the CR 2032 let's do it okay guys resumed in nice and tight again and again I'm gonna start by just loading up my tip here some fresh solder so we'll get a good thermal bridge between the tip and these landings here and I'm going to first start by reflowing some solder here on this side well I do that I'm just going to simply lift up just like that and we're gonna rotate this around I want to do the other side same principle with a float the Tippin above the solder here and that just comes off just like that and we're left with two beautiful landings here and what we can do if you really want to I don't think it's totally necessary let me just sort of introduce some fresh ten in there and some fresh solder we're going to mix the chemistry's up a bit this is perfectly fine it's perfectly healthy so we have some nice fresh solder it lowers the melting temperature based on what I'm using and it just knocks that oxidation off just a little bit more so want to jump into my bag here and I want to grab a replacement battery so now if you want to you can't add just a drop of flux here you probably don't need to this is one a wet fairly well but you know if you want to that's fine I want to bring my tip in here I want to load this up very generously like so I'm just gonna take my hands and I have the battery in position to where I want it as you can see here and I'm just gonna take maybe do like a two count one one thousand two one thousand drop it down just like that now we have a nice fill it here this looks really good I'm just gonna rotate this around so you can see the other side again if you want to just a just a drop I know it looks like I'm pouring a pool on there but that's really just a job we're really zoomed in here but at any rate we're gonna come in here we're gonna want a reflow just like so hold it down just like that beautiful joints and that's it you know twenty thirty two battery there in place of the twenty twenty-five it gives you a longer battery life uh and it just you know there's really no reason to use a twenty twenty-five in my opinion but I'm just gonna get some angle shots here so you can see that the beautiful fill up there underneath and over and as far as the the the positive side to our battery it looks just as good so that's it well I've got to tell you guys I am so happy to have my childhood copy of pokemon red working again I'm just gonna put it back together here and you'll notice that you'll notice that the top shell clears just fine with no problems there is not a clearance issue with using the cr2032 battery we just pop this which is pop to screw back in here like so and I can I can do that I think I can okay let's just give it a little shot here and I believe we are we're still in business fantastic so this is fixed and this is done I said we had another game to look at Oracle of Seasons and why would we want to look at this well this game works fine the battery still works for now but that battery it looks a little suspect here well it's different than the battery we just replaced so let's take this apart and let's take a look at it now Oracle of Seasons is a gameboy color game but notice the battery size now if you look here at the mask the mask um says that this is ACR 1616 and this is the same battery that you would find in games such as oh I don't know pokemon silver and gold and crystal but look this is the battery we just removed from pokemon red holy Shh is that a huge size difference now if you're going to be replacing the game the battery in games that use a real-time clock like a gin - pokemon the games that use a real-time clock and drain the battery much much faster than games that just hold save data because you know games with a real-time clock they're constantly having to count the time can you replace and pokemon and these other games these small batteries with a much larger battery and the answer is you absolutely can and I'm going to show you how to do that not only can you replace the smaller battery with a large cr2032 battery but it's not too big to where it won't fit back into the shell so we're going to remove this battery just like we did before we're gonna replace it I want to make sure we have no clearance issues let's do it and just as before we're gonna load our tip up just a bit here so we can create a nice thermal bridge and I'm gonna go ahead and place my finger over the battery and I'm just going to reflow the solder here on one of the tabs should go very fast and we're just gonna lift up just like that that sides free I'm going to rotate the cartridge PCB around and we're going to do the other side same principle reflow and left the tab like so very good so now we have our area here and I'll tell you what I want to do there's some unspent flux here this is a non corrosive chemistry obviously but I'm going to go ahead and I just want to clean this up just because I don't like looking at that I just want to dance a bit of here just doused a bit of isopropyl on here we're just want to cut through this real fast that's much better okay let's get our battery in position here I remembered this battery is much much larger so let's see if we need to do any trimming or anything like that and we don't you really don't have to the battery the the landings here in the footprint it should match up pretty damn well okay so I'm gonna put a generous amount of solder back onto my tip like so and I'm gonna bring our battery in here first I'm gonna make sure that see then see the negative symbol here I've got the polarity correct you certainly want to check that before you get started but at any rate I'm going to come in here and I'm just going to reflow the solder like so I'm gonna bring it in now drop the battery down I'm just going to let go just like so and I'm gonna come to the other side I'm gonna rotate this around so you can see this side and its might hang over just a bit but that's perfectly fine actually it probably won't by the time I get in here and then angle that in so we'll come in here like so and we're just gonna reflow that solder around that battery lead just like that don't mind a little splash there that won't hurt anything and that looks pretty good I'm gonna come back over here I just wanna make sure that we have a good fill out of solder underneath and over in what you can do is you can actually just introduce some fresh if you want but try to work fast you don't heat these up too much just like that and that looks really good so here we have it we have both sides here soldered in quite nicely and what I'm going to do is again I just don't like looking at it it's not going to harm anything it's good enough for me so there's our battery let's see if it clears in the new case okay here's our case let's just drop drop the game in there like so that's in and we're going to drop the top on there and it clears beautifully it clears absolutely beautifully so this battery will last probably several years longer than the CR 1616 we'll just because of the capacity of this battery so having said that that pretty much concludes in this video maybe next time we'll talk about how to dump or archive to save data that's on carts that haven't exactly gone south yet so that after you replace this the the battery you can you can load your save files or your SRAM states back into memory yeah you can actually do that with a retron 5 as a matter of fact if you have one of those but nonetheless guys this was just a quick video to help some of you out there who constantly ask about repairing and sort of restoring and resurrecting in a lot of cases Game Boy games I hope this helps and we'll catch you next time see you later

Channel: Voultar

Views: 85,916

Keywords: Game boy, soldering battery, CR2032, Game Boy Repair, Game Boy Battery Replace, Battery Replace, Voultar Soldering

Id: RaG69Ff1Fhg

Length: 18min 6sec (1086 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 07 2018