I bought a used GameBoy Color on Ebay with the purpose of taking it apart and adding it in. Once I had it all taken apart, I knew this would be quite the project. There was a few problems with the GameBoy Color. The main problem was the game cartridge connector mounted on the back of the circuit board. The second main issue was the fact that the buttons did not line up correctly with the front holes of the original GameBoy. Due to these issues, I decided it was time for me to learn how to solder.



I began by removing the battery springs and used the existing solder on the circuit board to attach some wires I found to run a positive and negative current to my power supply. I wasn't sure what that would be, so I tried using the battery from the Nintendo DS. It worked, so I had an easy power supply that would work on my DS and GameBoy Color!



The next step was heating up and removing the key components of the board that I needed to relocate. That seemed pretty easy at first. I removed the link cable connector and the game cartridge connector. All the other parts did not hinder the circuit board laying flat, so I left them. I took some old floppy disk cable that I had laying around and separated the wires. To reconnect the parts that I removed, I wired each connector pin to the hole it used to go into.



I messed up the first time and burned out a few of the holes on the circuit board. I also tried to bend the connector pins flat to make the soldering easier, but unfortunately I accidentally broke a few off. So I called up a local video game store and luckily they had a GameBoy Color in stock. So I took it apart and removed the parts again. This time my rewiring job worked. I plugged in a game and tested it out to make sure it worked correctly. Since it was working, I used some hot glue to fix the wires in place. This way I could prevent any wires from coming loose during future steps of the project.



After the soldering, I lined up the circuit board with the GameBoy case. The directional buttons and start/select buttons all seemed to line up well, but the A and B buttons did not. Also the red LED power light was a little off, so I removed it and wired it up like I did the other components. The last thing was to rig up something to get the A and B buttons working. That is in the next step.