Game Boy Advance backlight mod
It’s been quiet for a while, busy playing Breath of the Wild and Mario Kart 8 Deluxe on the Nintendo Switch. I still follow what’s going on in the modding scene, I watch other people’s mods and occasionally pick up some cheap handhelds. A couple of things led me to doing a Game Boy Advance backlight mod, making it possibly the best retro handheld console there is! 1) using BennVenn’s JoeyJoebags you can flash Chinese knockoff cartridges 2) I found a NES emulator/rom compiler for GBA, and 3) the GBA is backwards compatible with the original Game Boy and Game Boy Color games.
I’ll go into some more detail on each.
1) I initially bought the JoeyJoebags to be able to flash homebrew to cartridges and play them on real hardware, which I’ll write about later. Never did I realise that you can actually reflash the Chinese GBA Pokemon clones, and other carts too. Most likely you’ll have to patch the ROM for it to work and save properly, but that’s okay. However, if your clone cartridge does not have a backup battery things get more complicated, which I’ll get into in again another post. Let’s just assume we can flash any rom for now.
2) Pocketnes is a great emulator that runs NES games in full speed on a GBA. It has been around for a very long time, but I never came across it as I wasn’t really into GBA consoles. It comes with an application that let’s you select your NES roms and it will compile a GBA rom that includes both the emulator and the NES roms you chose. I created a compilation of my favourite games as a kid, flashed it to a Pokemon cart and it’s absolute magic. I might write up a post specifically about Pocketnes, it’s really good.
3) Because of it’s compatibility with older systems you have a ton of games at your disposal. Sure, you could play GB games on a backlight modded DMG or Pocket, but what about Game Boy Color? Yes, you can mod a GBC using AGS-101 screen, but it’s pretty expensive and it hardly fits into the shell. So why limit yourself to just GB and GBC? You could pickup a Game Boy Advance SP with a backlight, that’s the AGS-101 model, but they are also pretty expensive and I don’t really like the form factor. It’s just too small for my liking. GBA it is!
I picked up a couple of GBA’s on the cheap, really old and dirty ones. The one below was also missing the battery compartment lid.
You can find AGS-101 replica screens for around 25 euro nowadays. Depending on which model GBA you have, you’ll also need a ribbon cable. Mine were all 40pin models, so I also ordered a couple of Type B ribbon cables. I also bought some replacement shells as you have to do some modifications and I like to keep the original shells, well, original.
So, here goes!
You have to remove some parts of the case or else the screen won’t fit or not sit straight.
The screen’s ribbon cable together with the converter cable end up being quite long, so in order to fit everything you will have to fold the cable into a Z-shape. No sharp folds, just gently fold and stick it down with some tape.
There is only one wire to be soldered, making it quite a convenient mod. You have to solder it to the upper left pad of DA-1.
Put everyting together and give it a spin!
