Hello! I’m part of the Makers Local 256 hackerspace and have access to an electronics lab and a ton of people with EE degrees and lots of experience with soldering. So my original Virtual Boy that I bought on clearance at Walmart when I was a kid back when they first stopped making them finally quit working for me. It has the same “does nothing” when you turn it on problem. I bought some screwdrivers on Amazon to open it (they worked PERFECTLY):
Then I turned on the power from batteries in the remote and saw the little red LED light up on the corner of the U8 DC to DC converter module just like discussed here. I then took a meter and measured (careful to pick the right pins and not short out the whole thing) ground to Vgood and ground to Vout. It turns out that both Vgood and Vout are both producing the ~8V that come in through Vin. So it looks like this module isn’t doing the ~8V to 5V step down that it was built to do.
I went on eBay and bought two more base units for around $30 for one of them and $80 for another with three games. They both work perfectly! I’ll use the meter to see if the Vgood has any sort of delay when it turns on and report that back here.
So now today I get an email from element14 and see that they have tiny voltage regulators. After reading the datasheet it looks like I can just replace the U8 module completely with one of these and it should be good to go! I’ll give it a shot this weekend and let you know how it goes!
