The Gameboy Curse - Vertical Lines & Dead Pixels - While most DMG Gameboys (Dot Matrix Gameboy) are still functioning a growing number of them have vertical lines in the display. Or glitched games displayed on the screen. Fix The Blinking Nes: 72 Pin Cleaning.

1. How To Fix Dead Horizontal Lines On Gameboy Dmg 1
2. Curved Line
3. How To Fix Dead Horizontal Lines On Gameboy Dmg Download

So I had taken a Nonfinite V3 backlight out of a DMG that I'm pretty sure I messed up the ribbon cable connecting the two PCB's pretty bad and went to go install it on a Game Boy Pocket that I have. I get the backlight installed and now it does this:

So it 'POST's and I can hear the startup sound, but no Nintendo logo (or lack thereof) appears and the screen is split in half by a column of pixels.

I've also successfully backlit a red Pocket with the same version of backlight and it turned out perfectly. I'm really hoping I didn't mess up the ribbon cables on this Pocket too, but I wouldn't be surprised at this point.

How To Fix Dead Horizontal Lines On Gameboy Dmg 1

Bdo sometimes my attack wont do dmg. I know that the more experienced modders will probably be aware of this, but when you Google around, the established wisdom is that horizontal lines are 'almost impossible' to repair, so I thought I'd share my success story from tonight in repairing a dead horizontal line in a DMG.

I decided to put together an all white themed Game Boy with frosted clear white case using parts I'd scavenged from old manky DMGs. In this particular one, there was a bunch of vertical lines that I fixed before going in for the backlight. The screen was stuck down pretty well, and I must have done something to the cable while I struggled to get it off as there was a horizontal line dead once I had the backlight installed. Eugh.

Curved Line

I thought it might be pressure on the screws or screen, but nothing helped. Since I was going to have to confine the damn thing to the scrap heap anyway, I decided it wouldn't hurt to give the white ribbon cable the old soldering iron rub treatment and see if it did anything. I knew it apparently melted really easily, but I have a temperature controlled soldering iron that I invested in a while ago when my first shitty one died. I tried it on the lowest setting (around 160C), and rubbed it over the length of the white cable, but no joy. The line was still there. I decided to bung the temperature up a bit (to about 210-220c), and then rubbed it all over the cable - all along the length, up to where it connected to the screen, and back down - everywhere basically - holding for about 1 or 2 seconds tops. After a couple of goes at this, I slid the polarising filter back under and the damn line was gone!

I'm not sure if this would work for those screens with bigger horizontal problems, but since most of the time DMGs with these problems get chucked away, it's worth a bash!

TL;DR - to fix horizontal lines, before throwing the DMG away as a write off, try setting an adjustable soldering iron at 200ish Celcius and rub all over the horizontal white ribbon cable.

How To Fix Dead Horizontal Lines On Gameboy Dmg Download

Last edited by unexpectedbowtie (Sep 1, 2016 9:18 am)