As most other Virtual Boys are (or will be), my baby was suffering from the glitchy display disease, with red lines, miscoloring and other static crap distorting the screens, making it hard to make out any
graphics, let alone play any games. 🙁
I tried the “oven trick”, heating up the ribbon cables to make a better connection to the displays, but to no avail. The displays only got worse. By stroking on the ribbon cables while the VB was on, I saw how it affected the image and could then confirm that the ribbon cable’s connection was indeed what was causing the problems.
While I do realize that baking the displays in the oven again and again until you get it right can fix this, I also realize that this can only be a temporary fix, and that over time the problems are almost guaranteed to reappear.
I wanted a permanent solution, and the only one I could see was to get rid of those crappy ribbon cables altogether and replace them with some real, soldered wires that will never come loose.
Said and done. I ripped off the cables from the display boards and my first plan was to stick wires into the vias of the display board, so I wouldn’t have to solder to the narrow pads of the edge connector. After a few wires though, I realized I couldn’t get enough solder down into the vias to get a strong reliable connection, and the wires would come loose when pulled ever so gently… 😐
So I started soldering them to the edge connector anyways, right where the ribbon cable used to be:
I managed to lift a few traces off of the board due to the heat of my crappy iron >:( , and I suspected there would be too many bridges
when I was done (soldering to those thin narrow pads is really hard), so after coming about half way through, I decided to undo it all
and start over with the vias method again.
This time I started with scraping off the green insulation film around the vias to get a larger copper surface to solder to, and this worked a lot better: :thumpup:
After soldering all the wires I secured the joints at the board with some hot glue to relieve any stress on them when adjusting the IPD knob:
Board re-fit into the VB:
Soldering the other ends to the mainboard was more difficult since there are no (easily accessible) vias to stick them in.
I decided to keep the ribbon cable connectors on the mainboard, so I’d at least have some structure to solder to:
I put some blobs of glue here as well to secure the wires:
End result: Success!! 😀
I can now enjoy a VB without any display problems, and the best part is that I never have to worry about getting any problems in the future either, since the source of the evil is removed! 😎
These soldered wires should last as long as any other part of the system now!
Some notes:
This is a pretty difficult soldering job that requires a steady hand and a huge portion of patience. (I have the latter 😛 )
I would not want to do it again myself, and although the end results are wonderful, I would still recommend the oven trick to most people.
