Technical

Repair-bench reference guides for the handhelds I work on. Where the Journal tells the story of a repair, these pages are the checklists I actually follow at the bench — schematic-based, test-point by test-point.

Guides

• GBC Power Troubleshooting — diagnosing a dead Game Boy Color with a multimeter and a bench power supply: the full power chain, expected voltages at each test point, and current-draw signatures.
• GBC General Troubleshooting — for a GBC that powers on but misbehaves: startup glitches, audio faults, display problems, and which CPU pins to check when a specific function is missing.

More guides to come as I work through them.

Credits & sources

These guides lean on the incredible documentation work of the Game Boy modding community — especially the schematics and CPU pinouts published by Natalie the Nerd, the general troubleshooting methodology shared by BucketMouse, and the community common-issues documentation at gbwiki.org. Credit for source material is given on each guide.

How these guides were made: I’m a newbie working on this alone — no electronics background, just a soldering iron and stubbornness. These pages came together through trial and error on my own consoles, digging through Discord servers, Google searches, and YouTube teardowns, and I used Claude (Anthropic’s AI) to help research, aggregate, and cross-check all of that into something readable. I’ve verified what I can against the schematics and my own bench, but treat these as a hobbyist’s notebook rather than gospel — and tell me when you spot something wrong.