First let me state I know there are a lot of other threads discussing the glitchy display problem, but I felt like mine is more of a story.

When I first bought a virtual boy, it had a glitchy display. So I had to return it. Then I looked to ebay to buy one. I bought one and it was completely dead, so I got in touch with the seller and he said I could exchange it for a working one. Now, I’ve been following the forums here for a while and was beginning to feel more competent in fixing a VB display. It was soon later that I saw mbuchman post a new method of fixing it, by using solder. I was in no hurry because my VB display was working perfectly, but I figured I would begin to prepare for the worst. So I bought a bit to take apart the VB case and had to grind it down so it would fit in the two deepest holes in the VB case. I have yet to put those screws back in and have had no problems arise because of it. Anyways, I eventually bought a soldering gun and desoldering braid (the latter of which came from a worker at my local Radio Shack who had never heard of it before.) My VB was still working at this point, so I bought a flashboy plus and exchanged 2 carts for a bound high cart on these forumns and it was soon after that, that my vb left display was becoming glitchy. So I opened it up and figured I would power it on upside down before doing anything else and it worked again! It worked for some months before the issue came back, so I decided it was finally time to work at it. So a month ago I followed what mbuchman did in his youtube video and much to my dismay the cable displayed a pure red image! So I used a digital multi meter and checked each pin and found 6 or so of them to not be working. So I tinnened each pin only to find it still didn’t work. It turned out that the solder got a bit messy and melted some of the plastic higher up, pulling the copper coating up thereby breaking the signal.

So finally, last night I figured I would check each pin and melt away the the plastic would a solder tip with no solder. I did this, checking each circuit with the multi meter and after some effort, each pin was working again! So I plugged the cable back in and much to my dismay the screen still wasn’t working! Then I realized I had put it in flipped (hey, I was tired haha). I put it in the proper way, and it worked like new! The screen was of the brightest shade of red!

Here’s a picture of the [kinda messy but working] display cable!
http://i77.photobucket.com/albums/j79/wazzal9/IMG_1154.jpg

And I figured I would take a few more..

This one is of the display with the red plastic eye piece removed:
http://i77.photobucket.com/albums/j79/wazzal9/IMG_1162.jpg

And this is a shot of the board, through the red eye piece:
http://i77.photobucket.com/albums/j79/wazzal9/IMG_1159.jpg

Got a little artsy with that last one, but I like the effect it gave off.

Anyways, that’s my story. I’m now back playing though Wario Land and trying out all the homebrew I missed out upon.
It’s a great community we have here.
🙂

Great story! I used the oven method to fix mine, but I’m sure the feeling was the same. There is a certain amount of satisfaction knowing you just performed open-heart surgery on your VB to bring it back to life! Nice work, my friend!

Great man! Always feels good to have accomplished such a task. Even though it seems like it took you more time than it could, you still got it done, enjoy!