Because I have had a few other careers before deciding that computers were my strongest passion, my skill sets are slightly more diverse than many of my peers.
This allows me to offer a more diverse set of services for Kadence Solutions’ customers. It also provides me with a lot more fun in my day-to-day work life.
I recently encountered a new employee at one of my customers who had a love of all things Nintendo. He was in the early stages of his professional life and found that many of the Nintendo items that he wanted to experience and add to his collection were, financially, out of his reach.
I recalled that I had recently rescued a Nintendo GameBoy Advance from a trip through the e-Waste shredder. My intent was to see if I could restore it to life and perhaps sell it to fund some other project. I decided that finding the GameBoy a new home would be infinitely more satisfying.
Since the GameBoy refused to power on it was presumed dead and cast aside. We all know that many, many items that seem broken are actually repairable. My intent was to have some fun figuring out what was wrong, and if something could be done about it.
I expected the inside of the GameBoy to need as much cleaning as the outside did. I was pleasantly surprised to see that this unit has already been refurbished in the past. It appears that the USB port and the control buttons may have already been replaced.
After removing and cleaning the battery terminals it was time for our first test. It seems that this GameBoy needed nothing more than a little bit of maintenance and it lit up like a champ.
Knowing that there weren’t any in-depth repairs needed I took apart the case again and gave it all a good cleaning. I was hoping for a much more challenging project but sometimes things just work out with simpler solutions.
I had expected to replace the screen cover due to that water damage on the surface. As it turned out a little plastic polish worked wonders and it didn’t really need replacing.
While there was little reason to continue working on this now fully functional GameBoy, I was somewhat bothered by the smoke staining on the case plastic around the control buttons on the left-hand side. I tried a few different methods of cleaning that and none of them got it as clean as I would have liked.
To resolve this I opted to try some “retrobrighting”. This is a process of restoring yellowed plastics with a hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) solution. In some cases this works by spreading a paste onto the plastic, others by immersing the plastic into a solution.
I had a suitably sized acrylic tank and some 35% peroxide on hand so I opted to soak the GameBoy case for a while to get it back to it’s original Arctic White colour. Peroxide in a 35% solution was overkill so I mixed it in solution with some distilled water. 35% Peroxide will burn skin very quickly and needs to be handled with care.
While not entirely necessary I opted to place the GameBoy case face down in the hydrogen peroxide with the acrylic tank sitting atop an ultra-violet lamp hoping for the best effect and was not disappointed.
In my haste to get the GameBoy into the hands of it’s new owner I neglected to take the after photo of the GameBoy case. While it did return to a beautiful pristine white colour after some time in the tank, I neglected to photograph it and can’t prove my results.
Not every project goes perfectly.
The new owner of this shiny GameBoy was absolutely ecstatic about the gift and has been playing a great amount of Tetris.
For me the repair is usually the most enjoyable part and it was nice to be able to breathe new life into an abandoned piece of electronics while handing off a little bit of joy to someone else.
