The Gamboy Light-Color is a mod board which basically is a Gameboy color in the shell of a Gameboy Light. This mod is perfect for you if you like the esthetics of the gameboy pocket but want the battery life the original Gameboy color had! I designed this board so it only uses parts that Nintendo used in this time period. It is compatible with the original Gameboy Color Screen or IPS screens.
There is no cutting and rewiring involved in building a Gameboy Light-Color!
The board just fits in a Gameboy Light Shell and feels like an officially released model.
To install the OEM gameboy color screen a few modificatins to the shell are required.
The prefered option is to use a Gameboy color IPS Q5 LCD kit. Also here are some modification on the shell required to install the IPS mod.
The BOM is available and is pretty much identical to the BOM for the Gameboy Color.
The pcb is designed so you can keeep using the original gameboy color screen but for the best result an IPS mod is prefered.
The screen i am personally using is an unbranded Q5 ips mod.
Caution: Do NOT use a laminated Q5 ips mod and also don't use a Q5 ips kit with the light up logo.
Some of the kits with the light up logo don't offer enough Y-position adjustment for the image!
I had good luck with the unbranded green PCB q5 ips kits. They do have a light up logo but offer enough Y screen position adjustment.
This board features some quality of life improvements which make the assembly easier and adds additional features.
The images are taken from a Gameboy pocket-color but the vias and other features are in the same spot on the light-color.
There are added vias that can be used for sodlering the required signals (A, B, start and select) for the IPS mod. This way you can hide the wires behind the screen and they will not be visible in a clear shell.
The PCB does include a navigation wheel that can be used to for exmaple control the IPS mod. Personally i wired it to the brightness and color palette selection to replace the touch buttons. Just removing the touch buttons ans instead soldering to the provided pads of the navigation wheel should work just fine. If you want to definitely make sure there are no accidential touch detection you can remove the touch ICs from the IPS mod and directly solder to pin 1 on the pcb.
The Navigation wheel works like a switch and has different operations that can be triggered by rotating it up, down and pushing it in. The Pads are named by the operation that is triggered by the user. When the operation is triggered the pad is connected to the "common" pad. For the IPS mod the "common" pad has to be connected to the "GND" pad which is right next to it. To connect the pads an 0603 0-Ohm resistor or a piece of wire can be used.
If you want to have brightness change when rotating the navigation-wheel up you have to connect the brightness pad to "UP" on the MGLC board. In my oppinion it makes sense to connect the color palette change to the down pad to allow changing the color palette when rotating the navwheel down.
Hint: For people hunting shiny pokemon you can wire the "PUSH" pad to the testpad "RES" on the MGLC board and reset the gameboy by pushing in the navwheel!
The BOM and the mentioned component values and part names are identical to the retail gameboy color boards and can also be used to buy spare parts for your stock gameboy board.
The BOM can be found in the "BOM" folder or following the below link:
More images can be found in the images folder.
