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Learned that 90% of Game Boy batteries are soldered wrong from the factory
Was trying to fix a DMG-01 last week and found a post on a retro repair wiki showing that most Game Boy batteries from 1989-1995 have the positive and negative tabs swapped at the solder points. Checked three of mine and sure enough two were backwards. Has anyone else run into this or am I just unlucky with my units?
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mason_ward26d ago
Oh, I believe it. That's the thing with mass production from that era - they valued speed over everything else and just assumed nobody would ever open these things up. It's like how you'll find mismatched screws in furniture from the same decade or one missing washer in a faucet kit, small mistakes made because the person on the line was rushing to hit a quota. Once you start looking closely at how things were actually built back then, you realize a lot of it was held together by luck and good timing.
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grantthomas26d ago
Man that makes total sense honestly. It's the same thing with a lot of older consumer electronics - companies cut corners on QC because they assume nobody will actually fix them. I've seen this kind of lazy assembly in everything from old VCRs to cheap keyboards, just parts slapped in however and shipped out.
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