Modding the Sega Game Gear with McWill Screen, New Caps

The classic gaming industry seems to be enjoying the same explosion of popularity as the revitalized vinyl album market. With various catalysts such the low cost of production for small, single-board computer systems and the proliferation of cheap LCD panels, we've seen many interesting solutions hit the market in the past couple of years. Some of my favorites have been the NES and SNES Classic, the SNK Mini, the C64 Mini. Many fun new home-brew options are also now available such as 3D printed cases wrapped around Raspberry Pi boards housing thousands of classic games. Technology these days is incredible.

An example of a mini console with Raspberry Pi inside

One of the things about emulation is sometimes a game works well, and sometimes it can run a little funky. Situations like this can leave you yearning for that original hardware… back when times were simple and you could slap a big plastic cartridge in an over sized toaster-like device and everything worked perfectly. You might even dust off your old systems to see how they've held up over the decades. That’s when you realize hmmn… some have not aged as well as others.

If you showed any youngster a Sega Game Gear today, they’d think it was a piece of junk, and I suppose they’d be half right. I was a huge fan of the Sega Game Gear back in the day, and for days when you’re getting shuttled around in the family van, it was like living in the lap of luxury. Having a color screen on the go was revolutionary, and you had to save your allowance for quite a long time to get not only the Game Gear, but a $50 rechargeable battery pack to boot.

The jumbo-sized Game Gear PowerBack

Why was the battery pack necessary? That puppy would eat six AA batteries in four hours flat. It was as inefficient on juice as a Hummer is on gas. Much of that was being drawn from the 160x144 pixel color screen with back-light. Compared to LCD screens today, the screen looked like someone took several layers of Saran wrap and window tint and covered it up. Everything is faded looking and slightly blurry… and this is even on the newer, better Majesco screens.

As you can see, he doesn't like it very much

Not only is the screen lackluster by today’s standards, but the capacitors in the unit are also ready to give up the ghost. Capacitors are little tubular parts that store energy in a circuit, you’ll find plenty of them from the earliest circuits in existence to your cell phone today. Electrolytic capacitors tend to be one of the first things to die in old electronics. These are typically the first items to be replaced in most older electronics which are being refurbished, such as popular amplifiers from the 1960s. The Game Gear caps are getting to be three decades old, so they’re on the way out if they haven’t started leaking already. It doesn't help that caps during this time were especially poor quality either. If you're curious about capacitor degradation, Quora has a nice article about it.   

The innards of a typical capacitor

So what is one left to do with a poor old Game Gear that no one loves anymore? Fortunately, you have options. Many sellers on eBay will sell you a batch of capacitors to replace all the caps in your system for $5-10. They come with directions too. If you’re handy with an iron, this is a pretty easy task and will take 1-2 hours to replace them on all three internal boards (the power board and sound board are mounted separately). At the end of the day though, you’re still stuck with that crappy screen.

An example of a Game Gear Capacitor Kit from eBay seller GeekTronics

Fortunately, a gent named McWill offers a mod so that you can install a fresh new LCD screen in your game gear. It’s not a cheap mod, $120 as of this writing, but given the niche market for something like this, it seems reasonable. It also comes with a VGA output, so that’s a value-add right there. The difference of this screen is amazing… bright and crisp. Night and day compared with the old screen, and the new screen uses much less power to boot. So where’s the fly in the ointment?

McWill Game Gear mod available from Console5.com

I’m a hobbyist and I like to tinker with things and enjoy soldering PCBs with through holes parts. This, however, is not a fun mod… it’s more like work. There are minuscule SMD resistors which need to be moved/bridged and soldered to, and there are very small traces underneath, which if damaged would be difficult to find a trace on the board to fix… you’d be digging around for a schematic, and I don’t know if one is out there for the Game Gear… especially since there were 5-6 versions over the years.

My suggestion: unless you are very confident with your solder skills, I recommend you have someone else handle this mod for you. Your first time through will likely take 5-6 hours if you like to check your work, and the prices people charge on eBay for the install are a bargain (assuming they do good work, I can’t vouch for that).  

While you're in there (or someone else is), another nice cheap upgrade is replacing the stock plastic screen with a new glass one. They can be found on ebay for around $7 and offer make the image even clearer. They are flat though, compared to the bulbous plastic screens, so they change the look of the game gear slightly. The glass screens can also be installed without opening the game gear, but it is a bear to get it off and you can damage the surrounding plastic. 

On another Game Gear, I tried using the typical plastic tools to get under the lip without success. I ended up epoxying a wooden dowel to the screen which I slowly leveraged up to get the plastic screen separated from the unit. 

Below you can get a looksie at the internal mod on a Magic Knight Rayearth red Game Gear using 24-gauge silver plated copper in PTFE hookup wire.

Adjusting the white balance so you can see the screen quality better

Given the McWill Atari Lynx installation is quite similar, I wanted to include photos of that as well:

I hope you enjoyed the write-up. Please keep those wonderful handheld systems alive!