In all seriousness, it wasn't as bad as I though it was gonna be.
A little back story:
At this past PRGE, a friend of mine traded a nice lot of Super Famicom stuff (including the console...that I really wanted to add to my collection), for something he really wanted; a Virtual Boy.
Excited as he was, he got it home and tested it. To his dismay, it was faulty. The left lens wasn't working.
I offered to repair it for him. I went looking for fixes and the "oven" fix was the main one that pops up. Now, I've heard of baking electronics to get solder joints to reflow, so I wouldn't mind doing this for him, but there were some hiccups.
First off, I didn't have a screw bit that would be able to reach in the far recesses of the VB. Because he really wanted it to get repaired, he offered to order the proper screwdrivers that would work for this particular case (pun).
Second, the whole oven thing. Backtrack to what is really holding the lens on. Nintendo used glue to hold the joints in place for the flexible ribbon cable that attaches to the lens (pics to follow). After so many years of not being played, the glue loses its adhesiveness (wow that was a word), thus losing the connection and having either lines or no screen at all, which was the case for this particular VB. The oven fix simply reheats the glue so you can re-adhere the connections together. This, of course, is a temporary fix since the glue can lose its adherence again in the future.
Enter another technique that has better staying power; the solder method. Upon reading about it, it's basically soldering the traces from the ribbon cable to the lens' board. In order to get to the traces in the ribbon cable itself, you have to remove some of the protective covering from it.
Now, the main fix has people using lye to dissolve the covering to expose the traces. I wasn't up to going out just to get some chemical that I was probably gonna use just for this particular project...well, maybe two since I was thinking about making my own bars of soap, but I digress. So knowing this, I was gonna give up and go with the oven fix.
Enter good ol' YouTube. Someone does the same method, but don't use any lye in the process. They just burn off the covering with the solder!
BAM!
So, fast forward to slow shipping from HK and a tendinitis flareup, I finally was able to tackle this thing tonight...with its fair share of headaches.
Workstation, ready to go.
After getting the lens out (sorry, no pics), I went to work. I effed up a bit, seeing that this was my first adventure doing this...well, the results were...
See all the brown nonsense below the cable? That's was the remnants of the melted covering.
After the first time with this, reinstalled it to the VB and powered it on with a game in it. It finally showed an image, but it was garbled. I pressed along the newly soldered area and it changed the image to something clear, then garbled, then in the wrong position, but readable.
To make it short, I had to take it out and take out some possible solder bridges on it. Ugh. It took some time until I finally had the image matching what was on the working screen.
YAY!butitwasaprematurecelebration...
After starting Teleroboxer, some lines were visible, to much of my dismay.
Worse yet, right screen went bonkers as well.
...FML...
Opened it back up and soldered the right lens.
This one I feel I did a better job on. The camera flash is playing tricks; there are no huge globs of solder there.
After getting the lenses reinstalled, I tried again. The right lens went back to working with no lines, but the left one was still being a pain. Since I didn't secure it down yet, I took my soldering iron and went over the ribbon again and combo'd it by pressing on the traces. Eventually, whatever glue was there helped grip on or the solder flowed where it needed to, so I got a nice, clean, 3D image.
...NOW we can celebrate.
I just put it back together and now I'm running tests with a game in there. I'm trying to see if this fix has staying power.
I'm just happy I could repair something instead of effing it up.
On a side note, I myself love the Virtual Boy. It had some great games in its time, and I'm glad to see that there's a nice homebrew community following it. Play testing my friend's VB tonight reignited my love for it...but I don't think my old eyes can handle it any longer than I was able to way back when.
There is a VGA mod for it...I may just try that in the future.
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