Good morning everyone! It's a new day, and I hope you enjoy it.

I started writing this phost about desktop designs and going off about how I
felt like heavy desktops sometimes took away from user content itself, but I
think that's a thought I'm going to save for another time. This time it's
going to be all about the Gameboy Advance stuff I've been up to!

Recently, and honestly I don't remember why at this point, I decided that I
wanted to get back into the GBA and that I wanted to get a modded GBA with an
AGS-101 screen. I already had a GBA SP, but there was a tremendous amount of
noise over the headphone jack and the battery indicator has... issues. After a
bit of looking around on eBay (and sucking it up and deciding to use my Paypal
Credit), I found one that I wanted that had an orange and clear reproduction
case. I bought it and waited on it to arrive. I also bought a fairly rare game
that I wanted - Boktai - which uses an on-board UV sensor to let you use
sunlight as a component in the game.

Whenever the GBA got here, the audio control did not work. At all. I figured
maybe the pot was just dirty or something and went to open up the case to fix
it (instead of just filing a return immediately, like, y'know, I *should* have
done). Whenever I opened it, two of the plastic posts holding the cheap
reproduction case together broke off: bad part number one. Putting rubbing
alcohol onto the pot, even several times over, managed to do nothing to fix
the sound issue: bad part number two. To top it off, apparently isopropanol
can leak underneath the screen and totally screw up the backlight: bad part
number 3. So I had essentially a Gameboy with no audio control, a broken case,
and a ruined screen that I couldn't return. It was an awful day.

After some further debate and distress, I figured that I might as well add on
a few more bucks onto my credit and just try again; after all, I've got
$23,000 in student loans for a degree I didn't even want; I might as well have
$160 in debt for something I'd actually get something out of (maybe... don't
take financial advice from me, lol, but I had enough to cover it in the case
of an emergency by the time it would start collecting interest anyway; please
don't buy things you don't have the money for). I found a clear and purple
hydrodipped GBA with a nice carrying case. The seller confirmed that the audio
was fine, so I went on and bought it.

And then it got here. It, too, had issues. There was some pretty severe
ghosting/image retention on the screen, and the colors were also waaay darker
than they were supposed to be. I was frustrated, and I figured maybe the
ribbon cable was just loose. I opened it -- thankfully with no issues this
time -- and I adjusted the cables. Nada. Still the same issue. After a bit of
research I was under the impression that maybe the seller had used the wrong
ribbon cable adapter, as there are a few different types for these mods
considering different screen and board revisions. I contacted the seller and
asked if he could possibly do a refund or even a fix, and he said that he
would definitely be willing to do a refund but also asked if there was a price
I would be willing to just keep it as is. I figured I could probably still fix
the issue if it was just what I expected, and I asked for a $50 reduction,
which he gave me.

I knew that the GBA that I had screwed up had had the correct ribbon cable
since the screen colors were at least correct, so I figured I wouldn't even
have to buy an additional cable unless I was just incorrect. So, I got to work
and opened both up, but... Both had the same cable, so that wasn't the issue.
The primary difference between the two was that the second GBA had a
connection jumpered that wasn't jumpered on the first - which was actually
part of why I thought that he had used the wrong ribbon cable adapter. In
certain cases COM->RECV needs to be jumpered in order to fix washed out
colors. I ended up getting my soldering iron out and removed one end of the
jump, put some tape down, and tested the GBA, and eureka! It worked! I went
back in and removed the jumper wire and put the whole thing back together, and
it's been fine ever since. So I guess in some ways it was a good thing that I
had the original GBA to compare it to lol -- even if that was a costly
example.

The seller had actually asked me to tell him if I fixed the problem so that he
could make sure it was fixed on some other systems he had modded, which I
respect, so I messaged him about it and he thanked me and was glad it was an
easy fix. I've been happily playing Boktai on and off the last week, so I'm
honestly pretty happy with the purchase. Hopefully I'll never have to open the
thing again lol.

I'm going to be opening Boktai today to replace the RTC battery whenever it
gets here, since the one in it doesn't work and probably died well over a
decade ago. Soldering feels *so* good to me ever since I built that Altair, so
I'm actually looking forward to it. I want more boards to solder! C'mon, S-100
people, make me a cassette board! (There actually is someone right now, Jerry
Walker, creating a reproduction ADM-3A board and documenting the process on
Youtube[0], so I'm looking forward to that once it's ready. He's also
considering doing an Altair 680 replica[1], which, *hoo* I NEED).

Anyway, that's my promised Gameboy Advance post. I feel like it's gone on for
longer than I expected and has a weirdly different tone than most of my phlog
posts, but maybe that's just the mood I'm in lol. Catch you next time!

(Also, I put some pictures of the Gameboy Advance up on the SDF image gallery
site! Check them out[2])

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOaqbLCcuI8
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ye5PJbVoSCg
[2] https://wm.sdf.org/gallery/thumbnails.php?album=942&page=1&sort=pa