After more than two decades of abandon, for some reason yet unknown to my very own self, I chose to search for my old buddy, the partner of plenty of happy hours alone and with friends, and to play it again. The Gameboy, the original version, codename DMG-01.

And that was amazing.

That “frame mod” dates back then, when I was about twelve years old and I wanted to customize it with a newspaper page. I thought it was cool at the times: it was my very own, and I made that myself. But let’s not digress too much.

While the Gameboy powered on happily and every game worked fine — it was responsive, no screen issues whatsoever — I could hear a quite annoying buzzing sound from the speaker.

Plugging the headphones did not solve the issue — it eventually made it worse. The noise was independent on the volume, also. I tried to recall if I heard that humming noise back then, and I could not.

So I searched everywhere for a solution. What could be happened in the while?

I browsed YouTube, Reddit, and the whole Internet overall to shed light on my ignorance and solve the case.

Some said that it was just it: that it was normal, and to deal with it. But I really could not remember that hum, or atleast not that loud.

Some others said that old capacitors could introduce that hum and I should have replaced them.

Others that it just needed a good cleanup with a compressed air can.

So I thought to myself: before buying parts and learn how to solder (again… it was a while I didn’t solder any electronics), let’s try to clean it up thoroughly!

Now for the uncommon part: while I did not own a compressed air can, I did own a ultrasonic cleaner. I used it successfully to clean vaping devices for any kind of clogging junk: it could also work on my Gameboy!

So I unmounted it using a tri-shaped screwdrived I had from very old hacks; and dipped (almost) every part of it in alcohol.

There are plenty of tutorials about how to do that in detail but really, none are really necessary. The Gameboy is so simple and linear to disassemble and reassemble! You might want to take some pictures during the process though.

The recommended liquid to clean up electronics is isopropyl alcohol; but that is not common at all in Italy. So I used denatured ethyl alcohol instead.

While it could probably be safe to put the whole board altogether , I paid attention not to dip the LCD screen and the speaker. I read that the most critical parts where the volume and the contrast wheel, as both could easily accumulate dirt. But while I was at it, I tried to clean it in depth as much as I found it safe to do.

Then, well, I just let it dry out:

It looked dried up fine after a couple minutes, and probably it was: alcohol evaporates very fast. Nevertheless, I let it dry overnight.

I put every piece back together the next day and TA-DAH! I got zero, void, nul, nil, NO noise at all, either from the speaker nor from the headphones jack.

That is it: dirt can contribute to electronic noise in printed circuit boards. Good to know from now onwards. For now, problem solved. Let’s play hard!