sega game gear replacement lcd screen made in china

Your power board may be struggling under the strain of the McWill board ( it takes more power than a stock system ). Were you able to power it up and play games after capacitor replacement?

Also make sure to properly clean up the leaking electrolyte using alcohol and cotton swabs. I made videos on YouTube documenting and detail how to do capacitor repairs the professional way on a Sega Game Gear:

To avoid having to solder a lot of wires, we developed the Easy Soldering Guide, a piece of printed circuit board that solders directly to the connector on the original Game Gear display. This connector connects to the main printed circuit board via a ribbon cable.

The installation of the Magic Screen requires (in addition to the original screen and its backlight system of course) the removal of only 3 components.

If you choose to do the complete installation (5 wires to solder so), you can choose between the 7 display modes proposed in order to have the choice according to the game you are playing.

Thus the Magic Screen consumes between 1.6W and 2W depending on the backlight setting chosen and we have chosen to equip the kit with a switch-mode power supply for maximum reliability. We did not want to risk the linear power supply which sometimes causes a short circuit in the kit or in the console.

Note: beyond 3.5W the power supply card has difficulty providing the necessary power to operate the Game Gear. It starts to heat up and wear out prematurely, even more true if you use a flash card like EverDrive which consumes more power than a standard game.

This is especially true when it comes to a video game console that is more than 30 years old and has components that operate at voltages close to 50V. The Sega Game Gear is a fragile console that can be unpredictable.

TL;DR:It seems that the majority of Game Gears that have troubles operating is suffering from leaking electrolytic capacitors, so it makes sense starting with recaping. It is very important to clean the PCB thoroughlyof the electrolyte fluid from old capacitors. As GameGear motherboard will operate even with no caps at all, although not recommended.

I bought a Sega Game Gear(VA1 — Twin ASIC (837–7398–01, 837–7719–01, and 837–7996)) at a local flee market. Since it is a European version (different regions have different power plug polarity, so be careful what power supply you use), I used my Spectrum ZX power supply to test it.

So if your Game Gear is experiencing similar symptoms, try measuring the output of the powerboard (first 5V and than 34V lines after power up cycle). It is important that you attach the multimeter before powering on, otherwise you might miss the initial surge. If 34V is stable and the 5V is not, try resoldering the components that are shared between them.

A picture off Facebook from a professional repair man, please note he uses a lot of SMD ceramic/tantalum capacitors (tantalum has the lowest ESR) the size of the caps is 1210/1206. If you find them in the right values, this is a much better option than using electrolytes, because the physical space in the console is very limited and the ceramic/tantalum caps are much more reliable. This board also has the LCD screen mod.

If you’re still not getting the correct voltages a user on Facebook group suggested the Game Gear Power Board IC Repair Kit, which contains the electrolytic capacitors, MB3775 (size SOP 16) IC and 3 power transistors (A, B and C).

Turning off is a protection mode for Game Gear and something is grounding out (you have a short to the ground (measure resistance between 5v and ground with power switched off)). Can be as simple as a misplaced polarity on a cap, a fleck of solder, bad power board, electrolytic fluid from an old cap, or battery acid under a chip that you can"t even see. The base point for troubleshooting would be a nicely and thoroughly cleaned mainboard.

If the fault on your game gear is the CFL tube lights, no power light, black screen then power off. A few times switching on and off and it starts working, than it was suggested to swap tiny transistor next to the 0.47 50v caps, swapping(Q3, Q4 transistors fixed the issue in one case).

One easy thing to check is leave the Game Gear on, for some time. If your screen is still flickering pay attention to transistors (Q9 and Q10). Sometimes electrolytic fluid from leaked capacitors catches underneath one of the transistors or resistors and that can be causing a slight short.

The last resolve would be an LCD screen mod McWill or a Chinese clone. (all of the images are from FB group and are here for educational purposes only)

If the lines roll and are not static, than there is usually still hope that recapping will fix the screen issue. With static lines it usually means that there is physical damage to the screen or the driver chip died or is on its way out.

Matt Marshall from the Facebook group suggested that sometimes these lines can be removed by (very!) gently warming up the LCD chip & ribbon cable and basically attempt to re-flow the ribbon cable, this should be used as a last result as you may damage the screen. If the lines roll and are not static, than there is usually still hope that recapping will fix the screen issue.

Alex Schot from FB group: “The middle IC LCD driver chip is losing connection or failing. Sometimes applying heat to the IC (hover your soldering iron above it for example) and then pressing down will fix the issue.” You could also try with a hairdryer.

This screen was saved by changing electrolytic capacitors. If the lines roll and are not static, than there is usually still hope that recapping will fix the screen issue.

Some have tried to fix this issue by heating the right edge of the GG LCD but have also had it come back not to long after. This issue seem like a typical case off ribbon cable detaching from the screen matrix. As a last resort I would try to heat the connections and try to re-flow them.

Vertical lines aren’t unfixable so much as its only a temporary fix, they are caused the same way they are on Game boy screens, just heating the ribbon cable with hot air and pressing it down usually removes them however every time the system gets hot you fix melting the connection and it probably dying again.

A newly designed drop in replacement power board for the GG, that is currently in beta testing. Instead of the barrel plug it has USB-C, so you can power it from a traditional USB power supply, power bank or computer for example.

TL;DR:It seems that the majority of Game Gears that have troubles operating is suffering from leaking electrolytic capacitors, so it makes sense starting with recaping. It is very important to clean the PCB thoroughlyof the electrolyte fluid from old capacitors. As GameGear motherboard will operate even with no caps at all, although not recommended.

I bought a Sega Game Gear(VA1 — Twin ASIC (837–7398–01, 837–7719–01, and 837–7996)) at a local flee market. Since it is a European version (different regions have different power plug polarity, so be careful what power supply you use), I used my Spectrum ZX power supply to test it.

So if your Game Gear is experiencing similar symptoms, try measuring the output of the powerboard (first 5V and than 34V lines after power up cycle). It is important that you attach the multimeter before powering on, otherwise you might miss the initial surge. If 34V is stable and the 5V is not, try resoldering the components that are shared between them.

A picture off Facebook from a professional repair man, please note he uses a lot of SMD ceramic/tantalum capacitors (tantalum has the lowest ESR) the size of the caps is 1210/1206. If you find them in the right values, this is a much better option than using electrolytes, because the physical space in the console is very limited and the ceramic/tantalum caps are much more reliable. This board also has the LCD screen mod.

If you’re still not getting the correct voltages a user on Facebook group suggested the Game Gear Power Board IC Repair Kit, which contains the electrolytic capacitors, MB3775 (size SOP 16) IC and 3 power transistors (A, B and C).

Turning off is a protection mode for Game Gear and something is grounding out (you have a short to the ground (measure resistance between 5v and ground with power switched off)). Can be as simple as a misplaced polarity on a cap, a fleck of solder, bad power board, electrolytic fluid from an old cap, or battery acid under a chip that you can"t even see. The base point for troubleshooting would be a nicely and thoroughly cleaned mainboard.

If the fault on your game gear is the CFL tube lights, no power light, black screen then power off. A few times switching on and off and it starts working, than it was suggested to swap tiny transistor next to the 0.47 50v caps, swapping(Q3, Q4 transistors fixed the issue in one case).

One easy thing to check is leave the Game Gear on, for some time. If your screen is still flickering pay attention to transistors (Q9 and Q10). Sometimes electrolytic fluid from leaked capacitors catches underneath one of the transistors or resistors and that can be causing a slight short.

The last resolve would be an LCD screen mod McWill or a Chinese clone. (all of the images are from FB group and are here for educational purposes only)

If the lines roll and are not static, than there is usually still hope that recapping will fix the screen issue. With static lines it usually means that there is physical damage to the screen or the driver chip died or is on its way out.

Matt Marshall from the Facebook group suggested that sometimes these lines can be removed by (very!) gently warming up the LCD chip & ribbon cable and basically attempt to re-flow the ribbon cable, this should be used as a last result as you may damage the screen. If the lines roll and are not static, than there is usually still hope that recapping will fix the screen issue.

Alex Schot from FB group: “The middle IC LCD driver chip is losing connection or failing. Sometimes applying heat to the IC (hover your soldering iron above it for example) and then pressing down will fix the issue.” You could also try with a hairdryer.

This screen was saved by changing electrolytic capacitors. If the lines roll and are not static, than there is usually still hope that recapping will fix the screen issue.

Some have tried to fix this issue by heating the right edge of the GG LCD but have also had it come back not to long after. This issue seem like a typical case off ribbon cable detaching from the screen matrix. As a last resort I would try to heat the connections and try to re-flow them.

Vertical lines aren’t unfixable so much as its only a temporary fix, they are caused the same way they are on Game boy screens, just heating the ribbon cable with hot air and pressing it down usually removes them however every time the system gets hot you fix melting the connection and it probably dying again.

A newly designed drop in replacement power board for the GG, that is currently in beta testing. Instead of the barrel plug it has USB-C, so you can power it from a traditional USB power supply, power bank or computer for example.

It turns out I’m far from alone in all this: from Facebook groups to Discord channels, there’s a lively and thriving community around the handheld refurbishing scene. Take Andrew Hendrick, for example: he too had fond childhood memories of the Sega Game Gear, and so, with the UK in lockdown due to the pandemic, he brought one to play around with in his spare time. Once again, the Game Gear was broken – because the leaky capacitors Sega used in these handhelds mean they all break eventually – but Hendrick decided to see if he could fix it. “In November [2020], I just decided to buy myself one,” he says. “I recapped it, and it worked. Then I did some research, and found the [replacement] screen. I had no soldering skills whatsoever, but I really enjoyed it. So I thought, ‘What else can I do with it?’ So I decided to paint one.”

Thus began an entire new pastime – and growing side business – for Hendrick. He began painting Game Gear shells with an airbrush and selling them on eBay, and then in March 2021 set up his own website, Retro Gear Customs, where he could sell refurbished, customised Game Gears. Meanwhile, he was practising and refining his approach to painting his shells: “Rather than painting the outside, I painted the inside of the shell. Everything I do is handmade – it’s not printed. I started painting them in lockdown and that’s how it [all began].”

Hendrick is but one of a growing number of hobbyists and professionals who’ve begun making replacement shells and other parts for handhelds over the past few years. Although founded in 2013, British company RetroSix has really seen its sales explode since 2020, with its online shop offering repairs and a wealth of mods and replacement parts for everything from the original Game Boy to current-gen home consoles.

RetroSix’s first product was a replacement shell for the Game Boy Advance – a business decision that, according to founder LukeMalpass, was partly born out of frustration. “I started it because the quality of the actual plastic was terrible,” he tells us of the existing shells he found on the market. “It was the only thing available – these cheap Chinese shells that don’t fit very well. So I made the 3D models, the moulds, the injection moulding, perfected it all, and released it. And that’s what I got known for – high-quality moulds.”

Today, it’s possible to take a tired, broken old handheld console and give it a new lease of life. You can replace the shells and buttons, improve the audio with better speakers and sound-boards; even replace the Game Boy and early Game Boy Advance’s dim, un-backlit screens with pin-sharp, modern ones. Thanks to the handheld modding community, you’ll also find replacement parts for more obscure systems like the Atari Lynx or Neo Geo Pocket, and even replacement LCD screens for the PlayStation Portable.

One hobbyist who’s really pushed the modding boundaries, though, is Mathijs Nilwik from the Netherlands. An engineer by trade, he began his console repair pastime around four years ago. “I’ve been repairing Game Gears for years – swapping capacitors, mainly, and later, replacing screens. I was just buying and selling them.”

Gradually, though, Nilwik noticed just how many Game Gears he was encountering that were completely destroyed, either because of leaky capacitors or battery acid eating into the systems’ boards. His curiosity piqued, Nilwik began to see if he could reverse-engineer a replacement motherboard, while at the same time refining it to reduce the number of components. “I have experience in redrawing boards, so it took a few days to reproduce the original board and fill in all the details,” he says. “Then removing the components took time, because I needed to understand what I could remove and what I couldn’t.”

Making a replacement motherboard meant that Nilwik could take an otherwise broken Game Gear and breathe life back into it: as long as the main CPU, brightness wheel, and cartridge connector were in working condition, he could install those on his new board and get the handheld working again. And thanks to the wealth of replacement parts now available, it’s possible to build a Game Gear that is almost entirely new – at the time of writing, RetroSix is on the cusp of putting new replacement cartridge connectors on sale, so all that’s needed is that original ASIC chip from a donor Game Gear. (A later revision of Nilwik’s board allowed the use of a modern brightness wheel, since the originals are no longer in production.)

Creating products like these is something of a leap of faith, since installing a miniature assembly plant in your garage requires a fairly substantial financial outlay (“It takes a lot of money to start – it’s not a few hundred euros,” says Nilwik). And when you’re dealing with something relatively niche like the Sega Game Gear, you’re taking a potentially big risk, as Malpass points out. “Nobody’s stupid enough to spend the amount of money I did on something that takes a long time to sell,” he says. “We needed a warehouse’s worth of space to store a small production – you have to make 1000 shells, minimum. So we ended up with 16,000 Game Gear shells [in] different colours… we’ve made the money back now since we were successful with it, but it’s hard to get right.”

This might even explain the dedicated online community that’s clustered around the Sega Game Gear in recent years. A less solidly built machine than its contemporary, the Game Boy, the Game Gear’s fragility helps endear it to a group of enthusiasts who enjoy nursing the consoles back to health. “There’s something about Game Gears,” Hendrick says. “With Nintendo, they just work.”

“Nintendo products don’t break,” adds Nilwik. “You can clean them a bit, and they work. But Game Gears are always broken, so it’s always a bit of a challenge to repair them.”

With a growing market for all things retro, however, comes rising prices. For years, old handhelds were readily available from online auctions and car boot sales for just a few pounds; today, even a tired, broken system can easily sell for £30 or more. “Two years ago, when I started, I could go to a retro event and pay £4 for a Game Gear,” Malpass says. “Some people would even just give them to me, saying, ‘These don’t work’. Now, it’s £40 or £50 just for a broken one. But still, I like to think I’ve helped grow the scene again.”

“When I started, I was buying Game Gears off eBay for £20–25 each,” agrees Hendrick. “Now I’m struggling to find them below £35–40 – they’ve gone up a lot.”

At one stage, Malpass says he was able to buy as many as 40 broken Game Boys from eBay and have them delivered the next day; today, he’s finding it much harder to readily source units that he can refurbish and resell. “That means we put our prices up. I started selling them at £65 two years ago; then they went up to £130 a year ago. Now we’re selling them at close to £300. We sell five consoles a day, seven days a week, so people are willing to pay for quality. But as the consoles get rarer, the prices have to go up.”

Assuming you can stomach the rising costs of those old consoles, though, the cost of upgrading them isn’t necessarily exorbitant if you’re willing to do the mods yourself; even once-expensive modifications like replacement screens are cheaper and easier to install than they were a couple of years ago.

As a starting point, Malpass and Hendrick agree that the original Game Boy or Game Boy Advance are ideal for newcomers. “I’d start with the Game Boy Advance, because you can literally fit a screen with no soldering,” says Malpass. “You just place it in, connect the ribbon, and then you can replace the buttons and shell without too much work. It’s definitely the easiest of the consoles, I’d say.”

“I’d say, don’t try and mod a Game Gear straight away,” adds Hendrick. “Do something slightly easier… you really want to start on a Nintendo [Game Boy Advance] because there’s usually little to no soldering on those – the modifications have been built that way.”

Installing the LCD is similar to those before it, aside from the fact that this can be installed with easy install flex cables.  The install instructions are both sent out with the boards as well as held on the RetroSix Wiki pages.  These instructions are both easy to read and also seem very professional in there production.  Within the instructions are both the wireless and the flex install instructions.

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In this post I write some notes about fixing a Game Gear with a very dark screen. The dark screen is one of the symtoms of failing capacitors in the console. This is a common problem with the Game Gear, and the procedure to replace the capacitors is pretty straight forward, although challenging in my experience, as I will further describe below.

To disassembly the SEGA Game Gear you need a regular Philips screw driver, and a Gamebit screwdriver (this is the same type of screwdriver you use for other consoles as well, such as NES, SNESand Gameboy). There are a total of six regular screws (including one in each battery compartment), and one Gamebit screw in the cartridge slot.

The Game Gear essentially consists of three boards: The main board, the power board, and the audio board. These are connected through three cables, which you should disconnect to separate the two parts of the housing. Disattach the _white_ part of the cables from the power- and audio board.

Now, it is time to identiify what model your particular Game Gear is, in order to buy the correct capacitors. I used the site below to identify my boards:

Many of the new capacitors I bought have higher voltages than the original ones, which is fine as long as the Farad (uF) is the same. The voltage of the replacement capacitors should _not_ go below the original ones though.

It is time to solder the new capacitors to your Game Gear. Of course you may also do step 3 and 4 at the same time, replacing the capacitors one by one. I cut and bent the capacitor legs on most of the components as shown in the image below.

I did not change the capacitors in the power board yet, but will probably do this in due time. Meanwhile, I will enjoy playing Game Gear games on original hardware.

Sometimes a game console is broken beyond repair, which was the case with a Game Gear I bought. I decided to convert it into an 8-bit gaming machine by adding Raspberry Pi + LCD-screen into it, while keeping the original Game Gear controller buttons through the use of a USB joystick board as seen below. I also added a fourth button, which I think is a minimum for running Retropie. For sound, I use a small Chinese amplifier between the 3.5 mm output of the pi and the original Game Gear speaker.