Gameboy Dmg Parts
As more and more various custom parts came out for the Game Boy Zero project, more and more people asked if I was going to do a followup guide for making one using all custom and aftermarket parts. So… here we are!
New Replacement Parts Gameboy Classic DMG-01 Keypads A B Buttons with D-Pad Pack-Dark Blue. $3.99 shipping. Orient Mall®New Full Parts Replacement Housing Shell Pack For Original Nintendo Game Boy(1989) DMG-01-Gray Color(bulk packaging) by Orient Mall. 4.7 out of 5 stars 2. Oct 05, 2017 Parts Question Where can I find a DMG-01 LCD screen? My DMG from 89 finally crapped out the other day and I took it to get it repaired. They said that they would have to replace the whole LCD screen, but none of their vendors could find it.
In this guide I’ll be showing one of the (many) ways you can piece together a Game Boy Zero using entirely custom and aftermarket parts. This means that you won’t have to chop up or sacrifice a single original Game Boy part to make this, which is nice.
Below is a list of parts that I will be using in my build:
- Aftermarket case from ebay
- All-in-one button PCB from Helder
- White NES-style buttons from kitsch-bent for X/Y buttons
- Green buttons/d-pad from handheld-legend
- Rubber button pads from ebay
- Speaker from Adafruit
- BW backup camera screen from Amazon
- 2500 mAh Lithium Ion Polymer Battery from Adafruit
- PowerBoost 1000C battery charger/5V boost from Adafruit
- microB USB Breakout board from SparkFun
- Powerstrip PCB from Helder
- JST battery extension cable from Adafruit
- 9mm tactile switches (I got mine locally but the ones linked to from amazon look identical)
- Volume wheel from ebay (not *quite* as thick as the original wheel, but close)
- PJ325 headphone jack from ebay
- Power switch from ebay
- Micro-SD card cartridge adaptor from prerunnerseth
- USB ports (I got mine locally but the ones linked to from amazon look identical)
- DS-Lite GBA cartridge readers from ebay
- Cartridge label from Dominator
- Aftermarket cartridge shell from kitsch-bent
- Screen cover from Dominator
- 3D-Printed screw bracket by wermy
- 3D-Printed button wells by wermy
Oh, and a Raspberry Pi Zero.
First I modified my case just like in the first build, but this time I left 1-2mm around the edges of the screen so that I can easily attach the screen cover from Dominator when the time comes:
I used the built-in X/Y button hole guides in Helder’s All-in-one (AIO) board to mark where to drill (super handy!). This time, in stead of making a pilot hole that I then expanded with a dremel (like I did last time), I used a Unibit from Irwin. It made it much, much easier to drill clean, perfectly-round holes right where I wanted them:
Hand Held Legend also sells a similar looking drill bit.
Next I mounted my screen. I used the BW screen from Amazon because it’s what I had on-hand, but lots of folks are reporting great success with the Gearbest screen, which is apparently very easy to modify to run off 5V and has a nice, consistent (and small) controller board.
If you do get one of the BW screens, be careful taking it apart because there is a *lot* of double-sided tape holding the screen cover on. I actually broke one screen trying to remove it. ಠ_ಠ
Once you get it taken apart, you may or may not need to modify it to run off of 5V. The one I got has a tiny controller board (nice!) but showed some flickering when trying to run it off of 5V without modification. Thankfully this particular board was very easy to modify: you just attach a wire from the red input power wire to the regulator chip pin shown here:
Once I did that all flickering went away and it works great! If you happen to get a different driver board in yours, be sure to check out the wiki to see if someone else has the same screen and has already figured out if/what you need to modify.
Next I mounted my screen just like I did in part 3 of the original guide:
I then attached my 3D-printed screw bracket and button wells, which worked wonderfully if I do say so myself:
Next I attached some wires to the All-in-one board before putting it and my buttons in the case. Specifically, I attached wires to 2 of the 3 available USB ports on it (I won’t be using the 3rd one), another set of USB wires to the input pins, and then wires for my L/R buttons.
If you have a spare USB cable (and who doesn’t?) that you are willing to chop up for this, it’s a perfect source of wire since it’s already color-coded for USB and appropriately gauged for the data and power wires. You’ll notice I only attached a ground wire to the L button pin on the right-hand side of the above image — I’ll be joining the ground pins on the L/R buttons on the other side of the case so it’s one less wire I have to run between the front/back of the case.
After I was done with that I went ahead and put it and my buttons in the case and started wiring up the headphone jack and speaker. The pins for the headphone jack I’m using go (from left to right in the above image): ground, left channel, right channel switch, right channel, left channel switch. What I mean by switch is that without headphones connected, they are connected to their respective channel. So, you’d want your speaker hooked up to the switch pins, and your audio source (the all-in-one board) connected to the L/R channel pins.
Since we only have one speaker, we’ll want to join our L/R channels. You can do this by adding a 10-Ohm resistor on each channel before joining them, as shown in the image below (all I had handy was 22-Ohm but they worked fine too):
I have yellow for my left channel and green for my right channel. If you don’t add the resistors, your sound will be distorted and noisy. Some discussion about this as well as some fantastic wiring diagrams by a3k4 can be found here (thanks a3k4!). The point at which the resistors join will be connected to one of the speaker wires, and the other speaker wire will be connected to the ground pin on the headphone jack. It’s also recommended to add some ferrite beads to the ground and L/R wires (before they join) that are attached to the speaker to further reduce noise and make it sound better. I don’t have any of those at the moment so I’ll have to come back and add mine later. Helder has mentioned that he may be adding those resistors and ferrite beads to a future version of the AIO board, so definitely keep an eye out for that!
Now wire it up to the AIO board:
The naming for the pads might seem a little weird (and Helder mentioned he’d probably update it in a future revision), but you’ll attach the ground wire to the “switch” pad, and the left/right channel wires to the left/right pads. You should go ahead and test it out before gluing/mounting your headphone jack/speaker.
The setup for this is nearly identical to what I did in part 5 of the original guide: you attach the PWM0 pad on the AIO to GPIO pin 18 on your Raspberry Pi Zero and PWM1 to GPIO pin 13, and add “dtoverlay=pwm-2chan,pin=18,func=2,pin2=13,func2=4” to the end of your config.txt file (definitely check out the original guide if you need clearer instructions for doing all that). In addition to those things, you also need to connect the 5V/GND input wires on the AIO to your Pi (PP1 for 5V and PP6 for GND), otherwise your amplifier on the AIO won’t have any power:
And then you also need to attach your volume wheel to the POT1,2,3,4/GND pads on the AIO board:
If you’re holding your volume wheel with the pins facing down, you can just connect the wires in order as shown above. After you do that, you should be able to load up RetroPie and test it out!
If that checks out, then you can go ahead and attach your headphone jack and speaker:
Mine’s a little messy (i.e nothing covering the resistors next to the headphone jack) because I’ll be coming back later to add some ferrite beads, but you get the idea. 🙂 You may need to add a piece of plastic or something under the headphone jack to raise it up a bit to where it needs to be.
I was going to mount the volume wheel, but I’ve got something I want to try out with that, so I’ll save it for next time. I’m hoping to have the rest of this build wrapped up in one more installment of this guide, but we’ll see how that goes…
Until next time!
Welcome back! Believe it or not, this 2nd part of the all-custom-and-aftermarket part GBZ guide will finish it (compared to 6 parts for the original guide)! I won’t bother listing everything we’re covering since it’s just “everything else.”
For a list of parts I used in this build, check out the top of the first part of this guide: http://sudomod.com/game-boy-zero-custom-parts-guide-part-1/
I did add a two more 3D-printed parts to make a couple spots easier (more on those shortly):
- A power-switch brace: market.sudomod.com/3d-printed-power-switch-brace
- A DS-Lite GBA cartridge slot mount: market.sudomod.com/3d-printed-dsl-gba-cartridge-slot-mount
Also, before starting, I would ask that you PLEASE test things out every step of the way! Don’t just rush through the guide, close the case up and wonder why it doesn’t work. If you do something wrong or something breaks, you want to find out as soon as possible, so test often!
And if you do run into problems, stop by the forums! Lots of people there (including myself) who will be happy to help you out.
Since doing part 1 of this guide, I finally got some ferrite beads to add to my speaker, so I went ahead and popped those on before starting the “real” part of the guide. These can help reduce interference on your speaker and quiet down the hissing/humming a bit.
The ones I got are toroid/donut-shaped, so all you do is slip whatever wire you want to reduce interference on through it, and you’re done. There is another kind that already has a wire through it for you to solder wires to either end, but they function the same.
You’ll want to put one on each channel right before the resistors where we joined them together, and another on the ground wire of the speaker:
And that’s it! I wouldn’t say it was a *huge* difference, but it does seem a little cleaner-sounding.
Next I mounted my display driver board. I used a piece of perf-board (I love that stuff; so versatile!) to separate it from the metal backing of the display:
Carefully insert the ribbon cable and secure it with a bit of glue (you don’t need much). The BW screen feels much more flimsy to me than the Adafruit one, so be careful not to press too hard on the screen when gluing it down.
Next I mounted my volume wheel. You need it to stick over the edge just a bit, and center it with the “volume” text on the side of the case:
You’ll need something underneath it for it to rest on since we don’t have a gigantic display driver board for it to rest on, like we did with the Adafruit screen. I measured and printed out a little cube for it to sit on, but you could use anything for this, really (perfboard, popsicle sticks, etc. ¯_(ツ)_/¯ ).
Go ahead and put the two halves of the case together to make sure everything lines up alright:
Next I connected/mounted my power strip that Helder designed. You’ll have two long wires for 5V/GND input, and 3 sets of wires coming out of it for the screen, all-in-one board, and the Pi (I already had the 3rd set connected to the AIO board here):
Secure it with some glue in roughly the same spot that I put the hand-made version last time:
Next I put my L/R buttons in. I’ll sort of skip over this since I did literally the exact same thing as I did in part 4 of the original guide: http://sudomod.com/game-boy-zero-guide-part-4/
Next I took care of my power-related items. Only a few differences this time around from the last build: I’m using a JST extension cable to connect the battery from the battery compartment, I’m using an aftermarket switch, and I’m using a 3d-printed part to secure the switch:
The pins on the switch are similar to the DMG one: two rows of 3 pins, and each column is connected. When the switch is to the right, the middle column and the right column are connected. When the switch is to the left, the middle column and the left column are connected.
The actual plastic switch part is much bigger than the original, so we need to trim it down by 2-3mm, and trim the sides down so that it can fit in the slot on the actual plastic external switch part of the Game Boy:
The metal case of the switch is identical to the original DMG switch, but I wasn’t happy with how I mounted it last time. I just used a ton of glue to secure it and it was really messy/ugly. This time I designed/printed out this sort of brace for it:
It has a couple of raised parts that the switch fits perfectly between, so you hardly need any glue to hold it in nicely. You just glue it in the corner of the case (with the wider raised part to the right):
And then glue the switch in the brace. If you’re using an aftermarket switch like this, you’ll probably want to trim down the pins a bit and bend in the metal tabs.
Much, much cleaner than the first time around (cringe):
I have a this 3D-printed part on the sudomod market for purchase, or if you have a way to print your own, the .stl file is posted in the forum thread linked to in the market listing: market.sudomod.com/3d-printed-power-switch-brace
I used the same micro USB breakout board from SparkFun, and ground down the corners of it just like last time:
I wired that, the power switch, and a couple wires to power the external USB port up to the PowerBoost, and glued that down:
A word of warning: I actually mounted it all the way at the top at first, but found that the two halves of the case wouldn’t fit together because the JST connector was bumping up against some things on the display driver board. So make sure you test that your case fits together periodically!
For detailed instructions for wiring up the PowerBoost, as well as a thorough explanation of why we hook everything up that way, check out part 6 of the original guide: http://sudomod.com/game-boy-zero-guide-part-6/
Now switching back to the front of the case, it’s as good a time as any to mount the Pi itself. It’s easier if you have the PWM audio wires, as well as the composite video wire connected before mounting it since they use pinholes that go through the board (sorry for the blurry picture):
You can connect everything that uses the test pads after it’s mounted pretty easily.
Again, since we don’t have a gigantic display driver board to rest/mount things on this time, you need to raise up the Pi somehow. I (again) printed out a few little blocks of the appropriate size, but you can use whatever you want:
As you’re mounting it be sure to leave your SD card slot accessible. We’ll be using an external reader, yes; but just in case, it’s good to have access to it. Also make sure that you cover anything metal on the display driver board that the Pi might come in contact with, using something like electrical tape.
After you have that mounted securely (hopefully with the HDMI port lining up with the contrast wheel cut-out), you can connect the USB data wires from the AIO board (green goes to PP22, white goes to PP23), and the power wires from the power strip (5V goes to PP1, GND goes to PP6). You can also connect the composite video wire to the display driver board (the yellow wire).
Due to the STN construction of the LCD there are some contrast artifacts on heavy grey images but these don't normally occur during gameplay. Soldering required for your existing speaker and 2 backlight wires.While not a drop in replacement, this new screen does offer a superior backlight, amazing contrast and comparable refresh rate with the original. Some shell modification will be required. Gameboy dmg backlight kit. This can be seen in the image with the BennVenn SD logo - and is the absolute worst case example.This LCD does have blur/refresh latency similar to the original and isn't ideally suited for fast moving high graphics games like DKC. The PCB interconnect ribbon comes pre soldered when purchased here, other distributors may provide this loose and you'll need to solder yourself.You will need to enlarge the viewing window in the DMG front shell, and provide your own LCD protector (JellyBelly customs sell these).
You’ll notice that I have the green/white USB data wires twisted around each other. Some folks on the forums were having trouble with certain USB devices that were connected through the all-in-one board’s on-board hub. A few people had good luck with increased reliability by twisting the two wires together as shown above.
Next I wired up my internal USB port (which I’ll use for an always-connected Bluetooth adaptor). From the orientation shown below on the port, the wires go red, white, green, black. Also make sure to wrap the metal part of the port in electrical tape so it doesn’t short out anything:
Alternatively, you could also take apart whatever device you are connecting to that USB port on the all-in-one, and wire it up directly to the port on the board, skipping the physical USB port altogether. I wanted to have the option to change it out in the future, so I used an actual port.
Now for the cartridge slot/reader. I used the GBA cartridge slot from a DS-Lite, because you can purchase it cheaply all by itself (plus it’s much thinner and the pins are a lot easier to connect wires to). You do need to modify a couple bits of it though. You need to cut off the two ends, as shown below:
And then you’ll also need to cut off the two little raised parts inside (these were put there to keep you from putting original GB games in a DS Lite, so we need to remove them):
After you’re done it should look about like this:
As for wiring it up, we are using prerunnerseth’s cartridge board so if you’re holding it as shown below, the order of the test pads on the back of the Pi is 15, 19, 18, 14, 16, 17, 8, 5, skipping a pin between every one:
Here is a wiring diagram that people have been using on the forums: http://i.imgur.com/4QrsX3O.jpg
Don’t actually connect it to the Pi just yet though, just connect different-colored wires to the pins on the actual cartridge slot. Also one thing to note is that if you have a version 1.3 Pi Zero, test pad 8 has moved a bit from the picture above (but it is still labeled PP8).
Since this GBA cartridge slot is so much thinner/smaller than the original, there isn’t a clean way to secure it in the back of the case. Sounds like another job for 3d-printing!
The above part has 2 pieces: one that goes below the cartridge slot, and one that goes on top of it. The grooves on the top of the bottom part fit nicely with the notches on the cartridge slot:
This raises it up just enough, centers it, and just makes it much easier to glue down (with much less glue).
When you are positioning it to glue it down, it’s much easier to do so with a game inserted:
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It’s quite a bit easier to see the placement in a lighter-color case:
Run some glue underneath (this is why we soldered the wires beforehand), and run a bead of glue on the top part as well (watch the video if this part isn’t making sense – I’m not sure if I’m explaining it very well). Just be careful not to accidentally glue your cartridge in!
As with the other 3D-Printed parts, I have the .stl file posted in the thread linked to in the market link (or you can purchase one directly from me if you don’t have a way to print your own): market.sudomod.com/3d-printed-dsl-gba-cartridge-slot-mount
The cartridge itself is easy thanks to prerunnerseth’s board. Just pop it in! I decided to refrain from cutting a notch out of the side of my cartridge, as I hardly ever take the SD card anyway.
Applying the (awesome) sticker from Dominator (which was easy) was the hardest part of the cartridge!
Now go ahead and wire up the cartridge reader to the SD card test pads (and again, if you’re using prerunnerseth’s cartridge board the pins are listed further up), as well as the L/R buttons on the AIO board, and the input wires from the power strip to the PowerBoost (refer to part 6 of the original guide if you need details for all that: http://sudomod.com/game-boy-zero-guide-part-6/ ):
Gameboy Dmg 01
Finally, twist together the USB data wires for the external USB port, wire that up and mount it (which is covered in detail in part 4 of the original guide: http://sudomod.com/game-boy-zero-guide-part-4/ ):
If you’re using a JST extension cable to connect your battery, now’s the time to connect that, because we’re about to close up the case! You probably want to cut that down to only be a few inches long. Heat-shrink tubing is awesome.
If your display board has a separate button board, go ahead and connect that now too, and close ‘er up! You’ll likely have to fiddle with some wires to get it to close properly, but it was much, *much* easier for me to close up than with the original build.
Now to top it all off with the acrylic screen cover from Dominator. This was the first one of these that I have installed, so I went with double-sided tape as it’s what people on the forums seem to be recommending. I couldn’t find any super-narrow tape (I’ve heard you can find some at hobby stores), so I took some regular double-sided tape, pressed it onto some wax paper, and cut a 2mm-or-so strip of it:
Nintendo Gameboy Dmg 01
Then carefully place a strip on each side of the screen cover:
And press it in place! Make sure you get any fingerprints off of the plastic, and any dust off the screen before doing so. Canned air works great.
I was very happy with how the double-sided tape worked — seems to hold it securely and was very easy to install.
If you are looking for something a bit more durable, a forum member by the name of day is working on pre-orders for a Gorilla Class screen cover: http://sudomod.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1444
Gameboy Dmg Lcd Replacement
Now insert your battery, and marvel at the beauty that is a finished Game Boy Zero:
That (sick) custom boot animation comes from forum member AJRedfern (thanks AJ!). I’ll be showing how to set that up, as well as other common settings/questions people want in RetroPie in an upcoming video/guide, so stay tuned for that!
Gameboy Dmg 01 Backlight Kit
If you decide to build your own Game Boy Zero, be sure to stop by the forums! Lots of people on there to help you out every step of the way.
Until next time!