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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Dude hacks DONKEY KONG, lets his daughter play Pauline!

Times have been tough for Pauline: the damsel-in-distress that Mario had to climb up those girders to rescue from Donkey Kong way back in 1981.  Mario and DK of course went on to bigger and better things.  Then there were all those women who came into Mario's life before he settled on Princess Peach.  But whatever happened to Pauline?

Mike Mika, who works at Other Ocean Interactive, was asked by his three-year old daughter if "she could play as the girl and save Mario".  Mika hacked into the ROM of the Nintendo Entertainment System's port of Donkey Kong and after fiddlin' around with the coded innards, he had produced what he calls the "Pauline Edition" of Donkey Kong!  Here's a clip of it in action and you  have to admit, it's a really sweet thing to do for a kid :-)


Jump here for more at Cinema Blend about this awesome hack!

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The most disturbing Super Mario Bros. video you will EVER see

A guy named "petermolyneux2" on YouTube has... well he might have some issues, if his short film "Nintendo: A Sad Story" is any indication. I've watched this three times now, trying to make sense of what exactly I'm looking at. And now I CAN'T GET IT OUT OF MY HEAD!! No sound sleep for me tonight.

No sound sleep for you either, maybe, if you choose to let enter your gray matter this clip that surely must resemble what the 1993 Super Mario Brothers movie would have been had Neil Gaiman written the script...

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One of the reasons why I'm waiting to buy into 3D television

At E3 today Nintendo head honcho Satoru Iwata unveiled the Nintendo 3DS. This is the latest iteration of its acclaimed DS hardware... and it does games in 3D.

But here's the kicker folks: the Nintendo 3DS pulls off three-dimensional gaming without those funky glasses!

And this highlights the biggest reason why I'm not about to buy into the 3D television "revolution" going on right now (incidentally ESPN's new 3D channel is showing up in the updated listings but it's not only not airing yet, my receiver box is snidely informing me that I need a 3D capable set in order to pick it up at all). This is such a rapidly evolving technology, it makes the least amount of sense to be an early adopter than I've seen with burgeoning new gear ever. Especially given that the glasses needed to enjoy 3D television sets are priced around $150 each.

The cost of the glasses aside, television is much more a casual experience than watching a film in a theater. People don't usually do things like eat dinner and fold laundry while at the local cinema, but they do those things all the time while a TV is going on. Who wants to keep putting the glasses on and taking them off while watching 3D television? And are there going to be enough glasses to go around when friends and family come over for a visit? Do guests get asked to bring their own glasses over for a Super Bowl party?

People by and large won't want to be hassled with things like that. And that's why 3D television isn't going to seriously take off until there is 3D screen technology that doesn't rely on wearing the glasses.

And that, Nintendo and a few other companies are on the cusp of bringing to market. Given the early raves about the 3DS coming out of E3 in Los Angeles, this could be a big factor in encouraging demand for spectacle-less 3D. Hey, Nintendo broke new ground with the Wii, and now Microsoft is rolling out the very promising Kinect for its Xbox 360 console (with Sony to follow suit on its PlayStation 3).

Good money sez that if you ain't plunked coin down for a 3D set yet, you might wanna wait a bit. There promises to be even better stuff in the pipeline and headed to store shelves sooner than later.

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Wiiiiiii!!!

A lady named Amanda Flowers in Great Britain is, errr... blaming Nintendo's Wii Fit for causing her to have persistent orgasms.

From the article at the Daily Star...

A WOMAN has gone from Nintendo to nympho after a fall from her Wii Fit board turned her into a sex addict.

Randy Amanda Flowers needs 10 sex sessions a day after the slip-up.

And now the slightest of vibrations, from mobile phones to food processors, turns her on.

The catering worker said: "It began as a twinge down below before surging through my body. Sometimes it built up into a trembling orgasm."

A doctor diagnosed her with persistent sexual arousal syndrome due to a damaged nerve.

Probably a million-to-one thing that happened to Amanda Flowers and likely not easily replicated (no matter how many people will attempt it, no doubt). I found this interesting enough to post 'cuz I've some fascination with video gaming and human biology.

This just happens to be the first time that I've heard of a video game affecting one's sex life (apart from some examples that will readily come to mind :-P)

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A cool (and free) technical idea for the Nintendo Wii

This morning I was having a workout on Wii Fit (here's my initial review). My personal regimen right now is some strength training, some yoga and a lot of hard aerobic activity, followed by the "fun" stuff like the Ski Jump. That and the Ski Slalom might be the most addictive activities of the entire package... but Lisa swears that Bubble River will have you just as hooked.

Part of the aerobics that I'm doing right now is Jogging the long distance. It's really clever how this works: you don't use the Wii Balance Board at all. You just put the Wii Remote in your pocket (or if your pants lack pockets you can just hold the Remote in your hand) and then you start jogging in place. If you keep a brisk pace while swinging your arms in good wide circles you can work up a serious sweat. And all the while, the Wii is picking up your relative speed by how much the Remote in your pocket or hand jiggles about.

It's this use of the Wii's sensing technology that got me thinking...

Imagine a first-person shooter game like Doom or Halo for the Wii. Imagine having one Wii Remote that you use to aim like a gun at whatever it is on screen that you intend to shoot at. Now imagine two other Wii Remotes, one in each side pocket of a pair of pants that you are wearing. And to play the game you have to literally run through the map shooting at whatever bad guys there are while running and possibly even ducking for cover. The Wii will be picking up all of this movement as you play, including changes in body position and change of direction/speed (your velocity) as you run through the map. It would be like putting yourself directly in a game such as Gears of War... but instead of using a standard hand-held controller, your entire body - from your toes to your trigger finger - would control your in-game persona.

Can you imagine how much fun that would be? To say nothing of the workout that a person would be getting while probably not even realizing it.

There would be a few minor drawbacks for such a system though, but I think those might be fairly negligible. The most obvious is that to work like this the player must own three Wii Remotes. And there could be no multiplayer per this system. But with some minor tweaking, Nintendo programmers or whatever other company that makes this game could add the option of playing with only one Wii Remote along with a gun accessory and the Nunchuk add-on, and then possibly four players could do this at the same time. Or one Wii Remote could be placed in a pocket and pick up running while the Nunchuk controls movement and the Wii Remote operates aiming and firing, in which case two friends really could be running around shooting at each other.

That might even rival Boxing on Wii Sports for two-player fun on the Nintendo Wii!

If anyone at Nintendo or some other video game studio reads this and wants to play with it, feel free to do so. I'm not looking for any compensation for the idea. It just seemed like too neat a concept to not put out there and see if somebody could work with it. If this ever does become a Wii game, I would absolutely be the first in line to buy a copy (provided that everything else in the game was well-designed too, like the engine and graphics and sound and the story, etc. :-).

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Chris meets Wii Fit

So yesterday (which it barely is as of this writing) Nintendo released its much-anticipated Wii Fit. I had no idea what this was until Lisa was in Georgia a month and a half ago. She phoned home and asked if I could go to the local GameStop and pre-order a copy. Well you know, when you're a husband you do whatever makes your wife happy (unless you've got an "Ahab and Jezebel" thing going on, but I digress...) so I went and plunked down the money and was told it would be waiting for me on May 21st.

And then I went home and got on the Internet and found out what Wii Fit was exactly.

And then I found out that I had just committed to purchasing a ninety-dollar bathroom scale...

For the next several weeks, I found myself studying Wii Fit, wondering what the heck were we getting into. Let's start with the obvious: in the videos and all the other advertising that we're seeing for this thing, the people using the Wii Balance Board are playing with it in their bare feet. I don't know how sterile the plastic is that Nintendo uses in their products, but no doubt there's going to be some athlete's foot and other gnarly fungal infections coming from this thing during the course of heavy use among several people (like yer average-sized family). Plus, how clean does Nintendo expect this thing to be? Tonight millions of people across America are enjoying their white, pristine Wii Balance Boards. In a few weeks or even days those will start to turn an ugly, festering yellow as the skin oils from the soles of their feet (trivia: there are more sweat glands on the bottom of your feet than the rest of your body put together) permeate the boards. And according to the literature you're suppose to do this barefoot. Can't Nintendo engineer a pair of Wii Socks or something?

Well, we picked up our Wii Fit this afternoon and after Lisa finished watching American Idol tonight, I gave Wii Fit a try. In addition to the Wii Fit I also bought a silicone protective sleeve (much like those for the Wii Remotes) to go over the Wii Balance Board, and in spite of the instructions I chose to wear regular socks. 'Cuz I'm the kind of guy who likes to keep his possessions in good shape for however long I have 'em, and it seemed like the hygienic thing to do. I also wore black sweatpants and a dark t-shirt.

So how did it go?

10:12 p.m. EST: Inserted the Wii Fit disc into the Nintendo Wii system, then proceeded to synchronize the Wii Balance Board.

10:14 p.m. EST: Synchronization complete.

10:17 p.m. EST: I'm being asked to select which "Mii" to use for my personal account on Wii Fit. I use my standard "Chris" Mii, the one that kinda looks like mii... I mean, me.

10:19 p.m. EST: Wii Fit is now asking for my height and my age. Since this is a ninety-dollar bathroom scale I'm assuming that it has already precisely determined my weight.

10:25 p.m. EST: Wii Fit has just finished running me through some balance and coordination tests. It needs to do this so that it can calculate my "Wii Fit Age" and Body Mass Index (BMI). And according to Wii Fit... I'm two years younger than my physical age! Balance and posture is darn near perfect (only a few tenths of a percentage point more inclination on my right side). Not only that but my BMI is only slightly more than recommended (but according to Wii Fit I'm still in excellent shape).

10:39 p.m. EST: The original results were so good, that I ran them again, just to see if the results would duplicate. Because I want to make sure that this thing is measuring everything right for sake of accurate record-keeping. Sure enough, the results come out the same. I'm satisfied enough to proceed.

10:42 p.m. EST: Wii Fit is about to begin me on exercises and it starts off by asking me which "trainer" I want to work with.

Ooh-boy...

On the left-hand side of the screen is the 3-D rendered avatar of a buff, well-toned male. On the right-hand side of the screen, depicted equally well with Wii's 3-D capabilities, is a sultry and seductive lass who looks positively hot in her leotard!

If I choose to train with the man, I'll feel like people will wonder why I didn't choose the woman trainer. And if I choose to train with the woman, Lisa will get mad and I'll be "sleeping in the doghouse" for a week. Why couldn't Nintendo just let you work out with Mario or Toad instead? Why are they doing this to me?!?

So I broke down and chose to workout with the female trainer. May God have mercy on me...

11:01 p.m. EST: The sexy leotard-clad female trainer has told me that "You've got great abs! Keep it up!"

11:16 p.m. EST: Okay, I think that's going to be enough of the Wii Fit for a first time. All I did was a few sets of each of the four initial strength exercises, using the default number of reps for each one. Had to re-arrange the furniture in our living room some to do the things like jackknife and push-ups, and then put everything back afterward. I've set a goal to decrease my BMI over the next two weeks, to get it at the Wii Fit-recommended level for my height.

Based on this cursory experience, I think it's safe to declare that Shigeru Miyamoto has created another winner for his company. Wii Fit is certainly not a "toy" or anything that one should underestimated. If used consistently and with moderately increasing levels of intensity over time, Wii Fit could become a fantastic - and fun - part of any exercise regimen, with the benefit of yielding tangible results. It wouldn't be wise to rely solely on Wii Fit though: regular "traditional" exercise and good diet also go a long way. And I'm not in the peak of condition by any stretch: my goal is to eventually run a full marathon like my friend Chad Austin does all the time. Wii Fit won't necessarily build me up for something like that, but it should be a good complimentary tool toward that goal all the same.

If you've got a Wii, I'll recommend Wii Fit for ya. It seems quite worth the hype. And if you're wondering about real results, check out what happened to this guy after using Wii Fit for seven weeks.

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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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Wii are family: The things I do for the women in my life

It's now almost 2 weeks since Christmas, and Lisa is happily playing her new Nintendo Wii.

Yes folks, we have a Wii. And my sister does too!

How did it happen? The Thursday night before Christmas, I went to a GameStop store in Greensboro, where they were due to begin selling vouchers the next day for the Wii (which might have been the hottest item of Christmas 2007). The plan was that you buy the voucher, and your Wii comes in on January 25th. I figured hey, if it's 4 weeks after Christmas that's still okay.

So I got to the store, and lo and behold the nice associates told me that they had some Wiis in stock, that they were going to start selling the next morning.

"I'm not going anywhere," I told them. "I'm gonna be camping outside all night until you guys open tomorrow morning, if that's okay." They said it was fine, and after they left for the night they told me to stay warm and dry (it wasn't quite freezing, but it was cold and due to rain as the night progressed).

I was alone until about 1 a.m. that Friday morning, when another dude who'd come into the store that night arrived to also camp out so that he could get a Wii for his 9-year old son. A few hours later we were joined by two ladies (including one who was getting a Wii for her 67-year old father). Over the course of the next several hours, a few others arrived. The last on the scene before the store opened was a guy from Eden who told us that he and his wife had hit every store between Winston-Salem and Raleigh trying to find a Wii for his grandson.

Just after 8:30 a.m., the GameStop associate who had come to open the store told us that he could start taking us one at at a time, and that they had 11 Wiis that they could sell. And it just so happened that there were exactly 11 people waiting to buy a Wii in line. I was the first through the door, bought the Wii, and exited amid much cheering from my fellow campers! The grandfather from Eden bought the last one.

As soon as I had Lisa's Wii in my car trunk, I got back in line to get a voucher for my sister (they were limiting Wii purchases to one per person, the same with the vouchers). Even these were limited in number. I bought the voucher, and a few days later put it in a small box, wrapped that, and then put it in a series of several other wrapped boxes. When Anita finally got them all open on Christmas morning, there was a Wii voucher for her. But she didn't have to wait so long for it to be redeemed. A few days later, her Wii had already arrived. I delivered it to her during this past weekend.

So how is it? I haven't had much chance to use it so far, 'cuz I've been so busy with other things. But the Nintendo Wii might be the most immersive, challenging and fun video game system that I've ever played with. Lisa is absolutely loving Super Mario Galaxy, and I'm having a ball with Wii Sports (the Boxing game really gives you a strenuous workout!). The Wii also connects to the Internet via our wireless router, and you can check out news and weather when it's on, and even buy new games (that are saved on an SD flash card) through an online Nintendo store. I think Anita was really looking forward to playing with her Wii too: she's a physical therapy doctor, and she's been reading a lot of material about how the Wii is an excellent therapeutic tool.

The Wii wasn't the only video game system we ended up with for Christmas: through circumstances beyond my control (though I'm not regretting it at all), we also received an Xbox 360. So now I can finally play Halo 3 and see how that story wraps up (the ending of Halo 2 is still one of the most frustrating things I've ever seen in any video game). It also came with the Xbox 360 version of Marvel Ultimate Alliance, which I played on the original Xbox last year and it became one of my favorite video games ever. I think Lisa wants us to get Rock Band sometime so that we can jam in our living room, especially when we have friends over.

Now if I can only figure out which system I want to play Star Wars: The Force Unleashed on when it comes out in a few months. Gotta admit: the Wii's ability to swing a lightsaber makes that version pretty tempting... :-)

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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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PUNCH-OUT!! Trailer

Nothing I say can prepare you for how cool this is:

This was done for some video contest sponsored by Nintendo. I think it's one of the most brilliant videos ever put on YouTube. Oh yeah, and "Little Mac" has his own Myspace page, too!

If only Mike Tyson had behaved himself and not got his name stripped-off the Punch-Out game...

EDIT 6/21/2007 2:00 a.m. EST: The contest was something called Nintendo Short Cuts Showcase... and Punch-Out!! didn't win anything! But it's sure a huge hit on YouTube.

Amazing that a four-and-a-half minute short film about a Nintendo game produced by a gang of good friends would be something that's much more fun to watch than the full-length Super Mario Bros. movie done by a major studio.

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