Nintendo Game Boy DMG-01 Repair/Restoration

This was a project I did to learn a few new soldering tricks like "tinning" and "wicking" properly. I'm also generally interested in electronics repair, games, circuitry, computer repair, etc. So, it made sense to start with restoring old Game Boys that I found on eBay/Garage Sales/LetGo/OfferUp for dirt cheap. Most of the Game Boys I find are broken, but easy to repair with basic soldering techniques. There's also some vigorous cleaning methods involved. I looked into some of the "retrobrighting" techniques (bleaching of old "yellowing" plastics) for extra clean looks, but most of them seem to just offer temporary solutions (yellow comes back worse than before). There's plenty of videos on the interwebs for that stuff if you want to check it out.

Vertical line repair is needed for some of the systems I acquired.

Below are a couple of the Game Boys that I managed to successfully repair:

Game Boy A: Dirty shell. Barely functioning buttons, speaker, power switch, volume switch. Dead lines in the display.

Game Boy B: Screen works. Shell is dirt stained, yellow stains, smells like cigs. Missing screen cover. "B" button doesn't work. Won't read carts.

Some disassembly required:

And WALLAH! Fully restored:

Game Boy A

Game Boy B

And below are some others that I had completely re shelled because the original shells and parts were pretty haggard:

After putting blood, sweat, beers into these (not literally), it comes time to release them Game Boys back into the wild... world... of webs.