I was going to declare the Game Boy restoration finished, but I tried playing some stuff on it and the little red power LED next to the screen is just way too piercing.

I might hunt around and swap it out for a more mild colour, orange maybe, or just slap a resistor in there to dim it.

Mike, why did you want an old school cassette player that records and has line-in jacks and stuff anyway?

Well, a while back I inherited a stack of old ZX81 and Spectrum stuff, and having a modern device to replace this Sanyo that needs a lot of TLC makes exploring some currently unknown data a little bit more accessible!

The new tape deck will record a tape direct to an MP3 file on a USB drive really easily. It only seems capable of creating mono audio files, but that won't be an issue for this purpose.

#retrocomputing

Happy to report that my new vacuum sucks. It retrieved about half a cat (by volume) from the rugs in the lounge room.

My god Meech. Dude. Seriously. You didn't even spend that much time indoors until about a year ago.

This one cartridge is my nemesis. The other five I have here are pretty reliable now after contact cleaning, but this one still needs a couple of inserts and removals to get a good load.

I have even gone as far as reflowing it this morning, and it's *better* but still not good enough for me.

I think the issue is that it copped some extreme heat given discolouration on the case that the others don't have and the PCB is very slightly warped now, just enough that combined with the age of the slot on the GB itself that it's always on the edge of failure.

God help me I've done some restoration on a Game Boy for the first time and now I'm looking for more broken ones.

They're pretty pricey though, considering how many must have gone out there into the world.

Looks like the Game Boy Pocket is the most unloved version, so I might get one to play with.

#retrogaming