Fix your game gears!

My primary game gear finally died. Unlike my other game gear that just had the no-audio problem, my primary game gear would randomly power-cycle in the middle of games, which can also be attributed to the same caps.

For those who don't know, due to poor imported capacitors at the time of the game gear production, ALL of game gear systems will die prematurely, probably 95% have already died in the past 5 years. The cliff started a few years ago and it didn't take long before nearly every game gear had succumbed.

There's plenty of DIY sites on the interwebs to tell you what to do. But the cost of buying all the caps piecemail was pretty high, plus my soldering iron doesn't have the pin-tip needed to get between the parts.

But I found this dude on e-bay (z28_camaro305) and he sells refurbished game gears, AND he will take in your non-working game gear in trade for the new ones! Totally awesome.

I sent in my two game gears for credit on a new one. And I picked a unit that had the LED backlight mod so you can get about 8 hours of runtime out of the gamegear now. Better than the original puke-green game boy!
 
I haven't actually had a Game Gear die on me yet. And I've got about 15 of them. Were you using batteries or a power supply when it was dying on you?
 
I usually used a wallwart since it otherwise eats batteries. But I do occasionally use batteries.

Usually it's just the speaker audio that dies first (headphone audio usually keeps working). The other telltale signs are vertical smearing in the LCD.
 
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