Cartridge Battery Holder

Recently I’ve begun focusing more on restoring and refurbishing Gameboys instead of modding them. This way I can challenge myself to learn circuit boards, improve my soldering skills and save money since I will be buying cheaper individual parts instead of brand new screens and shells.

My daily routine these days includes a quick browse of Ebay with various “Gameboy repair” search terms. I sometimes get lucky and find good items for a low price and a couple weeks back I won a bid that included a Gameboy Pocket and Pokemon Yellow. The Caveat with the items are the Gameboy sometimes doesn’t turn on and Pokemon Yellow has a faded label.

I don’t have any pictures of my progress on the Gameboy but here’s what I fixed to get it to turn on 100% of the time:

• Replaced all capacitors.
• Soldered new battery contacts. The old ones were heavily corroded.
• Replaced the DC power port.
• Cleaned the entire board.

Pokemon Yellow only needed a new battery. To spice things up I decided to future proof the cartridge by soldering a battery holder instead of directly soldering a battery. This will allow me to forever keep the save file because now in the future when it’s time to swap batteries, all I need to do is plug it into a Gameboy while turned on, change batteries and blam done! The save file is preserved while the Gameboy is on so you can easily do a battery swap and lose nothing.

I could stop here and mark everything as complete but I wanted to do something about the faded label. An artist I follow on Instagram makes beautiful custom cartridges so I decided this is the perfect opportunity to get one of my own! Check out their store here Next Stop Please.