Recently, the Game Gear of a friend ceased to function. As is the case with many old electronics, I suspected that the capacitors in the unit had gone bad. Electrolyte capacitors contain a fluid and given enough time, that fluid can evaporate. Between the chemistry of soldered in batteries reaching the end of their lives and capacitors drying out, some electronics are doomed to start from the beginning. Thankfully these components are not necessarily hard to replace. Before having taken possession of the Game Gear, I suspected it was the capacitors and got information on the values. I have a box of capacitors in the house already.

When I received the unit and tried turning it on, the unit has no response at all. This configuration had a bolted on batter pack that used a couple of 18650 batteries. The battery pack was dead, and refused to charge. Fixing this is pretty easy with the right tools. In addition to a couple of 18650 batteries had had a couple of metalic strips to connect them along with insulating shrink wrap to prevent the batteries from being electrically exposed.

The Game Gear itself had lots of potential points of failure. There are a lot of capacitors distributed throughout the unit. The device has three circuit boards. One circuit-board has the power components on it, another has the audio circuitry, and then there is the main board. All of these boards have capacitors on them. But I thought most likely the ones on the power circuit board were my culprits. Rather than testing them, I replaced all three. My repair actions stopped there because the unit was restored to full functionality once those were placed.

Having opened the Game Gear though I found that its construction is fairly straight forward. I decided to start looking at some other old video game systems that I have within the house. When I had some of these as a child, how ever they worked was magical to me! Looking at them now, I see them as something that I can understand and manipulate or modify. That lead to a quick examination of the circuit schematics and the DRM that each one of these units used. Of all of the units I considered, the original Game Box and some of it’s derivatives (GameBoy Color, GameBoy Pocket) appears to be one of the easiest devices to target. I’m thinking of setting up a development environment for one, writing a “hello world” program, writing it to a cartridge, and seeing it run. I’ll be writing more about that here.

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