I Bought 9 BROKEN POKEMON Gameboy Games - Let's Try to Fix Them!

Trying to fix 9 broken Nintendo handheld consoles: https://youtu.be/xZMvUBPwIPo

I am running a small business like you in Japan. I am always learning from your channel. Thanks you very much, Steve.

The mystery component in the Pokémon silver is a crystal oscillator. Silver and gold added day/night features so had to keep time unlike the previous game

I think the biggest take away from this is that every time we blew on the contacts to momentarily clean them we were introducing moisture that would destroy the boards in the long run. I wouldn't be surprised if most of the corrosion and liquid damage is caused from spit

I love it that people buy broken games, fix them and put them back on the market. This is awesome. I hope these games will bring joy to many more people instead of rotting away in a garbage dump. Thank you.

Nice! Good to see some more Gameboy Games being rescued! Thanks for the shout-out too 👍

Thanks to you, I fixed my broken Pokemon Yellow game by simply resoldering a pin that came loose - an easy fix! Your channel is such an asset to people wanting to repair things in our highly throw-away world, thank you again :)

wow, I've been so misled. I work as a micro-soldering technician, and the guy who trained me told me those chips are unrepairable if they break, because they're soldered on the underside by a machine when the part is installed. I had no idea you could just heat them up, lift them off, and that only the outside pins would need soldering. Thanks for the tip, even if that wasn't quite your intent

After I watched this video I decided to try and repair my pokemon crystal version game. And guess what - I did it! the problem was mostly corosion, so after a good cleaning and a new battery, now everything works fine. Thank you for you videos, they are great inspiration.

17:22 - That is a crystal oscillator which is used for the real time aspect of the game. They can be found in Tamagotchis and digital watches as well.

Future reference! That second to last Pokémon yellow battery is what most of the unchanged ones look like and it’s always a good idea to test one that doesn’t have the band on it because it likely hasn’t been repaired in forever. The game can start just fine but you can’t save or start memory in some cases. A few extra seconds of love from you could save someone who doesn’t know from a big headache while you’ve got it open! Great video man keep it up.

Before watching your videos, I knew absolutely nothing about tech repairs or Fixes. Now that I've followed your content for the past few years, I feel confident with every repair I can make. I've actually managed to repair a few games and gadgets myself thanks to you providing so much general knowledge about certain pieces on your videos that apply to a majority of other tech. Thanks man. Keep doing what you're doing <3

This video is so cool, it almost makes something I thought was impossible to learn seem do-able to anyone.

Wait!!! Before you ditch the Pokémon red it has the same board as “Mary Kate and Ashley pocket planner” you can switch the chips to that one. I’ve done the same to fix a Pokémon red in the past!

It's great to see you working on something that I used to love playing so much and repair in my free time as well. The "capacitor" at 17:25 is actually a crystal oscillator which was used in certain games to handle in-game time based events (ie. growing berries in Emerald, participating in bug catching contests or finding Lapras on Fridays in Crystal, etc.). Nice to see you fix almost all of these cartridges!

I really appreciate how your sponsor's product is something that you're actually using in the video. It doesn't feel forced or annoying (as is the case with most sponsored segments in videos like these), and is a much more effective marketing tool as well.

Cool, never really knew how simple yet complex Gameboy cartridges were. My worst fear was that the chips may have been corrupt, but your video made me research the layout of these games a bit more. Genius to be honest, made cheap but also reliable (to a degree).

It's so easy seeing a StezStix Fix shoutout, I found his channel about a month back and binged everything. He has such a cool style.

Thanks for always being so transparent about everything. The fact that you wont sell something that your not completely comfortable with shows alot about your character.

A few comments: 4:48 I would definitely replace this battery if I were to resell that cartridge. Not only does 3 V mean it's probably halfway through its usable life, whoever replaced the original chose a lower capacity battery, which you can see from the smaller size. 6:00 As expected, the via was corroded all the way through. I would never not feed a wire through the via if I needed continuity through the via, for that exact reason. Also, I might've tried to find a path to route a cable only on the top side from point A to point B. It might "look uglier", but adding anything on the bottom creates a little bump that can be a friction point as the board moves back and forth from insertion, assuming the game is used a lot. 11:45 Something to keep in mind is that the missing corners of the cartridge would prevent it form running on a GBA. A GBA has a switch inside to detect whether the cartridge is a GB or GBA game. If the corner is missing, the game just won't boot on a GBA. 24:14 Actually, you didn't need to fix that particular via. It just goes down to one of the four test pads used to test the battery in the factory. For gameplay use, it's just a dead end on the board. A general tip is that you can deduce a lot just by looking how the startup logo is corrupted. If the logo says Nintendo but has black dots, it's an issue with one of the data lines which are approximately on the right third of the cartridge interface. (Or the corresponding solder joint, or any of the track in between, obviously.) If the logo is just a garbled mess, it's probably an issue with one of the address lines, which are approximately on the left two thirds. If it's just a black bar, it's likely either a problem with the read signal, 4th from the left, or a more major fault. If you plan on doing GB cartridge fix more regularly, a cartridge reader would be a good investment to be able to test the cartridges more systematically. It allows you to actually dump and confirm every byte of the ROM, instead of relying on playing for a bit and hope that the rest works.