Reviving an old friend

My mother visited two weeks ago and brought over some old gaming stuff left in her attic. My OG Gameboy had turned mustard yellow with age.

Time to get to work!

Yellowing on plastic can be reversed through a combination of hydrogen peroxide and UV light, so I put together a makeshift UV chamber using a blacklight UV lamp and some foil, and slathered hair bleaching cream on the case and wrapped it in cellophane.

I tested on an NES controller first, works well!

Much better!

Of course, even on a good day, Gameboy screens are virtually unusable.

So we order a backlight kit and bivert chip online and get to work.

To install a backlight on these screen you peel the puke green reflective layer off and stuff a led panel (the white square) and a polarization film behind the screen and solder some wires to power it.

And now I can finally play my favourite game, Mystic Quest (Final Fantasy Adventure to Americans), which is actually the first Mana game! (Seiken Densetsu)