Replacing the battery in a Game Boy cartridge (yes, it CAN be done!)

A few weeks ago I found my Game Boy Advance.  Still in pristine condition after being in a really nice case all this time.  Vintage game consoles seem to be enjoying a renaissance lately, like systems that play Atari and Nintendo Entertainment System cartridges on high-def television sets.  And this particular Game Boy Advance holds a special place in my heart, it having been a gift for Christmas eighteen years ago.

I still had a bunch of cartridges on hand: Game Boy Advance ones as well as for the classic Game Boy and the Game Boy Color.  They all still work great!  Except for one small problem...

The cartridges that utilize battery backup have almost all run dry.

Battery backup in game cartridges goes back at least as far as the original The Legend of Zelda for the NES.  After choosing to save a game it would use the built-in battery to hold the game state and vital stats, like which items your character possessed, amount of life it had, whatever.  I guess the most well known example of batteries used in game cartridges are the first several editions of Pokemon, before it went to flash memory starting with the Game Boy Advance (though batteries still powered the internal clocks of those cartridges).

But as with all such things, the batteries eventually go dead.  And along with it any practical means of playing the game again. If only there was a way to replace that battery...

It turns out, that there is.  And it works amazingly well!

Here's what you need:

From left to right: Game Boy cartridge, new CR2025 battery with tabs for soldering (available here), soldering iron (and sufficient amount of solder) such as this set that I used, and set of security screwdrivers (like this set available on Amazon for $6.99).

For the first attempt I used my copy of The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening.  Bought when it first came out in the summer of 1993.  Took me a few weeks to beat it (SPOILER: the entire game is just a dream, sorta like when Pam Ewing found Bobby in the shower).  Twenty-seven years later the battery inside the cartridge had long been dry.  Perfect specimen for experimentation.  In the pic to right you see the cartridge along with the 4.5mm screwdriver.  None of the Nintendo gear seems to have used standard screwdrivers.  Instead they're special "security" screws.  That set for seven bucks I just told you about?  It comes with 3.8mm and 4.5mm screwdrivers as well as a tri-wing screwdriver that's supposed to come in especially handy for Game Boy Advance cartridges.  Along with opening up other Nintendo cartridges and game systems.

So first we open the cartridge (shown with the new battery):

 

Instead of lifting straight off, the top of the cartridge sort of slides up and out from the rest of the plastic casing.  And then we get to the guts of the thing:

See that round looking gimmick?  That's the original battery, which is what will be replaced.  It looks welded to the board.  Which, it kinda is.  But it's going to be a snap to remove it.

Simply heat up the soldering iron and apply it to the places where the battery is soldered to the board.  It should not take much effort at all to do this to each solder.  Do NOT apply the iron to the battery itself!  Just on the two metal tabs coming off of the battery (which, is what they are there for):

 And here is the old battery now removed from the cartridge:

Make extra sure that you are soldering the right tabs to the proper places on the circuit board (i.e. + to + and - to -.  But if you keep in mind how the old battery was placed, it should be easy to match them up right):

Here is our new battery completely soldered onto the board:

And now the cartridge is closed up and screwed down tight, looking brand new as ever!

But will it work??  The game turned on fine when inserted into the Game Boy Advance.  I started a new game/file and after playing around with it a few minutes I saved and turned it off.  Waited thirty seconds before turning it on again.

And there is the saved game:

The entire operation took less than five minutes!  Emboldened by the first surgery, I now turned the soldering iron to Pokemon Blue.  I bought this on a lark in 1998, out of curiosity about what the Pokemon craze was about.

A few minutes and one new battery later...

My Pokemon Blue now has at least 22 more years left before it needs the battery changed again.  Which means I've plenty of time to catch them all before I turn 70.  Who knows: I may buy a GameCube and the other intervening consoles between Game Boy and Switch or whatever, just to keep expanding my collection until the day I die.  Yes, that too is possible.

So if you want to extend the longevity of your Game Boy cartridges, don't be intimidated by the batteries!  A few simple tools are all you need to keep your games going for the next several decades :-)

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Game Boy: Toughest product ever?

Slashdot has a neat discussion going on, which was inspired by this article at CNET about the most durable gadgets made. And right now wide consensus is that the original Nintendo Game Boy might be the toughest product to ever hit the market. There's one neat story about a Game Boy that was dropped into a lake and was on the bottom for a week before a guy in SCUBA gear recovered it: after drying out for a few days, it worked fine. I personally know of one guy who thought he'd lost his Game Boy after it went flying out of a car window in a minor fender-bender. He found it a few hours later at the bottom of a paved spillway: not a scratch on it! And then there's this Game Boy (pictured at right) which saw hostile conditions in the first Gulf War. It's now on display at at a Nintendo store in New York City and as you can see, it's still playing Tetris.

Not bad at all for a product that's almost twenty years old! Now if only iPods and every other popular gadget on the market nowadays had such durability...

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Nintendo moving to retire Game Boy

GameDaily is reporting that Nintendo is apparently set to retire the Game Boy brand name ... at least for now. The Nintendo DS has become such a strong component of Nintendo's gaming strategy that it's almost completely overshadowing the original Game Boy line: something that wasn't predicted when the DS hit the market a few years ago.

Since the first Game Boy model went on sale in 1989, the line has sold a staggering 200 million units, from the original "spinach-green screen" Game Boy to the Game Boy Advance SP Mark II.

I bought my first Game Boy - the original - in 1993 to play on the plane during my trip to Belgium. I played the heck out of that lil' unit (still have it in great condition too) and accumulated quite a library of games for it. Then the Game Boy Color came out in 1998: the moment I heard that Game Boy was finally going color, I knew that I had to upgrade. The day after that Christmas, I went all over town trying to find a Game Boy Color and ended up buying one (it was the purple translucent model) at the Target off Wendover Avenue in Greensboro. That one went everywhere with me and was quite a faithful companion when I moved to Asheville a little over a year later.

Then for our first Christmas since getting married, Lisa gave me a Game Boy Advance. I think I played it for about 5 minutes on Christmas Day 'cuz Lisa couldn't let go of it! The next day we went and got her one too and used to play against each other with that link-up cable. Then for Christmas 2005 when the Game Boy Advance SP with the brighter light-up screen came out, I got that for her as a Christmas present and she gave me a Nintendo DS. So in one form or another, portable Nintendo gaming has been a part of our lives for most of the past decade and a half. So many fond memories ...

I might do a feature at some point about all-time best (and worst) Game Boy games. In the meantime, it's sad to see Nintendo retiring a long-respected brand. But by any standard, it has had quite an enviable run for a video game system!

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