Comment by Waterluvian

Kind of tangentially related to weird ways tech works: a few weeks ago I finally disassembled my original DMG-01 Game Boy to fix it. There was decades of battery acid corrosion that took a ton of cleaning and resoldering and reflowing the screen connections.

After hours and hours of iterations I could get it to work perfectly, just once, for each cartridge. I would clean it a bit more, try a game, things would work great. I’d try another game and it the copyright logo would fail. So I’d clean it up a bit more. Swab the port and try it again. It worked! Then another game… nope.

I eventually realized that the isopropanol was making a weak connection work fine, and then I guess it just kept working once power was flowing.

No matter what I tried I couldn’t get it to stay fixed, so I keep a handful of cotton swabs and a small dispenser of isopropanol in the carrying case. I’ll swab a cartridge before inserting it and it works every time.

So now I have a Game Boy that requires alcohol to work.