What have I gotten myself into...
This project began, as many of mine do, by falling down a rabbit hole. A few months back, my step son decided he wanted to get a Game Boy. I was like... wait, seriously? You know the Game Boy is like 25 years old, the display is shit, has no backlight and it chews through batteries like Cookie Monster eat's chocolate chip? I even went as far as to set up Retroarch on his PC with the games he wanted to play (Pokemon gen 1 and 2), but nevertheless he insisted on getting a Gameboy and an original Pokemon Yellow cartridge. My guess is he saw some retro gaming channel on Youtube and decided he just had to have it. To his credit, he spent his own birthday money on it. He ordered a refurbished Atomic Purple Game Boy Color off of Amazon and a copy of Pokemon Yellow from Ebay, and he eagerly awaited the day that they arrived - only to be let down by the lackluster quality of the GBC and a faulty save battery on the cartridge. Curious, I started looking into ways to make the playing experience better. I knew about flash carts like the EZ Flash Jr., but after doing a little bit of research, I discovered that there is a vibrant, thriving online community of people who repair and modify old video game consoles and handhelds like the Game Boy Color, adding modern features that simply didn't exist when the hardware first came out, like back-lit LED displays, USB rechargeable Lithium batteries, amplifiers, speaker upgrades, premium buttons and membranes and whole replacement shells pre-modded to accommodate all those enhancements. Of course I didn't want to risk inadvertently ruining his Game Boy by attempting these modifications, so I got one for myself to modify and prove to myself I could do so without bricking it.
Here is the Game Boy in its original state. It's a lime green CGB-001 in pretty rough shape. It had a mismatched berry colored back shell and missing the battery cover, and the speaker didn't work. After opening the case up, it was pretty dirty and had clearly gotten wet at some point with visible corrosion on some parts.
Here's the finished product:
- Funnyplaying Atomic Purple "laminated" case
- Funnyplaying buttons and membranes
- Hispeedido OLED touch screen display
- Funnyplaying speaker
- amplifier mod
- LiPo rechargeable battery
- EZ Flash Jr. flash cart
- replaced the power and audio caps
All things considered, modding the Game Boy color wasn't terribly complicated. It required a bit of soldering, removing, replacing or adding some components here and there. The end result is a substantially better playing experience with a nice, bright display that I would have killed for back when I was a kid, nice clean audio, ample battery life and every game I own sitting on one cartridge.
But then the bug bit me. I couldn't stop there, and I ended up getting a couple of Game Boy Advances and modded them similarly. I enjoy modding these handhelds nearly as much as I enjoy playing them.
So, my step son has an Xbox Series X that he lugs back and forth between here and his dad's house every other week, and it's always a huge headache; the Xbox won't ever remember the wifi password, he invariably ends up leaving something over at his dads - a controller, a game, a power cable, etc. It's a huge irritation. So it dawned on me - maybe I should just grab an Xbox Series S that stays here and his X can stay at his dad's house. I looked on Amazon and found that new consoles go for $300-400 and quickly noped out. It's annoying having to deal with the weekly Xbox drama, but not annoying enough to spend that kind of money to avoid - and then I fell down a rabbit hole...
I thought to myself - kids break electronics all the time. Hell, my step son already had to have the HDMI port on his Xbox Series X replaced once and he's only had it since Christmas. He spilled something sticky on his laptop a few months ago which required a full teardown and rebuild, as well as having to replace the keyboard and CPU fans. A quick browse on Ebay informed me that there are tons of Xbox Series S consoles "for parts or repair" for around $100 with various issues, ranging from broken HDMI ports to various power or overheating issues. At the end of the day, a game console is really just a stripped down computer, and I have plenty of experience fixing those, so why not take a stab at repairing an Xbox? If I'm successful, I get a working Xbox and save myself a couple hundred bucks and a whole lot of irritation going forward. If it doesn't work, I'm out maybe an hour or two of my time and I can throw it back on eBay and make back some of my money. No big deal.
That's where this journey begins. I purchased an Xbox Series S for about $100 including shipping. The seller described it as turning on and booting up, sometimes making it to the menu, but randomly shutting off - which is actually a good thing. If it were not powering on at all, or immediately shutting off after hitting the power button, it would probably mean low level component repair on the motherboard, which I'm not afraid to do, but would require a lot more troubleshooting. Randomly shutting off could be something as simple as an overheating problem (apparently common on the Series S) which can be fixed with a deep cleaning and some fresh thermal paste, or it could be a faulty PSU not delivering enough power to the APU. I won't know until it arrives and I can do a thorough assessment.
Well... That was actually kind of underwhelming. It turned out this Xbox Series S had 2 problems:
- The power button was sticking causing some random shutdowns
- It was overheating
Fresh out of the UPS box, I plugged it in and it fired right up. I was able to do a factory reset before it decided to commit toaster bath on me. The fan was blowing out a TON of heat.
After disassembling it down to the board, I cleaned all the dust and debris out of the console and then replacing all of the thermal paste with fresh pads on the RAM chips and storage expansion slot and cleaning off the crusty looking paste off the CPU and replacing it with a fresh coat of Arctic MX-6, it fired right up. I wish I'd taken some pictures during the process, but in case you're interested these are the products I used:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09VDKSMQL/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B094PWW9TM/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1
Along with a toothbrush, some isopropyl alcohol and a toothpick to clean off the old paste. All in all, the process took maybe 15-20 minutes. After that I did a quick op-check on the Xbox and it booted right up and kicked off a firmware update.
I let it finish its firmware update, signed in with my Xbox Live account and all is well. Picking up an Xbox Series X for a hundred bucks and maybe a half hour of work is a big win in my book.
I ended up scoring a pair of wireless Xbox Series wireless controllers with points on my Amex card, so... I'm pretty happy with this project.
Cheers!