Today’s project: GBA Consolizer! (accompanying twitter thread)
The kit just recently arrived from game-tech. The donor console was a recent eBay purchase.
First step was removing the donor motherboard and beginning the prep work. Here it is after removing the battery contacts and speaker (I got to play with my Hakko desoldering gun…kinda overkill for this task!).
Flipping it over, the next task was removing the native power switch and bridging two pads using a bit of wire and a glob of solder. My hot air rework station made this super easy (just doing this with a soldering iron can be a rough process). Also had to bridge some contacts on the volume potentiometer.
Next was removing the oscillator, which again was really trivial with the hot air gun (the alternative is literally just grabbing and ripping it off, which was too scary for me).
A tiny resistor (R5) had to be swept off the board, which was not too tough (it was smaller than the tip of my soldering iron). Then, the most technical part: installation of the flex cables directly to the CPU. I haven’t done this type of work before, so I was a little nervous, but it ended up not being too tough. Once it is lined up you can tack it down without any additional solder, which keeps it in place for the definitive soldering. Generous flux, just a tiny bit of solder on the iron tip, and lots of patience is key. Here it is with a quarter for scale:
Next up was prepping the FPGA board that does the consolizing. I attached the SNES controller port and assembled and wired up the little power switch PCB. It was at this point I noticed that I needed to supply an LED, which I did not have handy. Here it is minus the LED next to the switch:
I put the project on a brief hiatus to run to Micro Center (I really miss Radio Shack!) for an LED (and to make a pit stop for some banh mi):
LED installed, I proceeded to assemble it. This turned out the be the hardest part, as everything is designed and printed with pretty exacting tolerances. I managed to gradually force the whole thing together and slap on the cute as a button Game Boy styled power switch and, miracle of miracles, it powered on and worked just fine! Here’s the final product, with an 8bitdo 2.4 GHz transceiver:
The image quality is fantastic–having now tried many many different methods of playing GBA on a television (MiSTer and GB Player over HDMI modded GCN are also pretty good), this is definitely my favorite. I now give myself permission to actually maybe finish Mother 3 :)
