

Using a razor blade or sharp knife, remove that rubber strip and the adhesive below it. For me, that strip stuck to the plastic Gameboy case when I took the board out, but from looking around online it seems like most boards will still have that slip attached.

Just below the display there’s usually a thin black rubber strip attached to that brown film. You can see here that the act of removing the display from its housing was enough to cause even more black vertical lines to appear. Once you’ve done this, put the batteries in the Gameboy, turn it on, and change the contrast with the knob on the left side of the display until the whole thing turns black (with the exception of the lines we’re fixing). It’s a good idea at this point to place a slip of paper between the top board and bottom board so that you don’t short anything out you don’t want to. If you’re having some real difficulty, double check that you have removed all ten screws. Don’t be too violent here, the board is thin enough you could put some stress fractures in it if you’re not a little careful. Remove those ten screws, and gently wiggle the front board away from the case. From this point forward, all the screws we’ll be dealing with are just phillips. Next, you have to remove ten screws holding the display board onto the front case. You can do this repair quite easily without having to put this connector back in. You could disconnect the ribbon cable at this point (it’s a ZIF socket, so the connector just slides out), but I didn’t want to bother having to reconnect it when I was done. Carefully hinge unit so the screen half is face down on your desk with the circuitry portion sticking vertically upward. There’s a fairly short ribbon connector connecting the screen half of the Gameboy to the circuitry half. Once you take those screws out, don’t pull the Gameboy apart quickly. There’s four obvious ones on the back of the Gameboy, and two inside the battery compartment. It’s not super difficult, but you definitely want to be careful to avoid stripping the screws. If you don’t want to spend a couple dollars on a triwing driver, you can do what I did and use a small flathead in one of the three slots in the screws. Triwing screws, for those of you unfamiliar, are Nintendo’s favorite way to make opening their products just ever so slightly more irritating. There are six screws, and depending on when your Gameboy was made, they are either going to be triwing or phillips. The first step is to remove the back cover of the DMG.
