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Inside the Nintendo Game Boy

April 7th, 2009 by Benj Edwards

Inside the Nintendo Game Boy

In honor of the Game Boy’s 20th anniversary this month, I recently dissected an original 1989 model of Nintendo’s famous handheld for PC World. Of course, I took pictures of the process.

This is the sixth entry in my “workbench series” of technology tear-downs for PC World. Here are the others: Nintendo Famicom, Apple IIc, Commodore 64, IBM Model M Keyboard, and TRS-80 Model 100.

I hope you enjoy it.



This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 7th, 2009 at 6:03 pm and is filed under Design, Gaming History, News & Current Events, Retrogaming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

9 Responses to “Inside the Nintendo Game Boy”

  1. Jason Scott Says:
    April 8th, 2009 at 12:14 am

    12 pages, a paragraph a page.

  2. Sirpaul484 Says:
    April 8th, 2009 at 3:48 am

    Tri-wing screws? I think you opened up a newer model game boy or something, because my game boy used phillips screws. Or, maybe mine has been opened up earlier. That’s possible, since I got it used…

  3. Benj Edwards Says:
    April 8th, 2009 at 8:36 am

    Sirpaul,

    I think my older game boy has Philips screws (it would explain how I got it apart as a kid), and the one I took apart was definitely a newer model. When I put this one back together, I used Phillips screws of the same size so I wouldn’t have to deal with the tri-wings again.

  4. orsty3001 Says:
    April 8th, 2009 at 3:26 pm

    I had taken mine apart when I was a kid, well heck I took my DS apart only a few weeks after I got it. I can’t leave anything alone.

  5. PWP Says:
    April 8th, 2009 at 8:56 pm

    I did enjoy it. Great job, Benj. I love seeing the inside of those things and your descriptions are always entertaining and informative.

  6. crackedLCD Says:
    April 9th, 2009 at 4:25 am

    It would be nice to have the whole article on just one or two pages – and links to high resolution versions of the pictures would also be very nice =)

  7. Jim Ulrich Says:
    April 9th, 2009 at 1:32 pm

    Did this Gameboy have the dreaded “lines of death” where whole vertical rows of pixels (usually at the edge of the screen) would disappear? When I finally retired my original Gameboy, it must have had six or seven of those lines.

  8. Benj Edwards Says:
    April 9th, 2009 at 2:52 pm

    No, it’s in perfect working condition Jim. I’ve heard of that problem, but I’ve never seen one (both of my original Game Boys are fine).

  9. snes roms Says:
    April 24th, 2009 at 1:01 am

    wow thanks so much this will come in very handy to my friend who modifys gameboys for music production 🙂

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