Bi-verting an original "DMG" Game Boy

Written 2009-04-18, transplanted here 2026-01-20

This article was written in 2009; I was a high school student at the time. The quality of the mod work and writing reflects this, so please keep this in mind as you read my ancient work.

Another note: I hastily thought of the term "bivert" to describe an inversion happening twice, and regret that this became a word people in the modding community actually used. I profusely apologize for making popular such a stupid word.

So, I already wrote about what a biversion was in my pocket guide - that can be found elsewhere - so I'll cut to the chase: This mod + an inverted screen == a really high contrast screen.

Materials

Materials and Tools

Process

Open up your DMG.

Find this part at the top.

There is an array of 6 dots near the top of the board. The lower-left and lower-right dots have two traces (light lines on the green part) going to the big white connector. Take your knife, and cut off the traces near the big white connector that come from the 2 dots:

Now, grab your 74HC04 chip:

Solder 2 wires from the big white connector (the pins corresponding to the traces you just cut) and solder them to pins 2 and 4 of the chip (starting in the lower-left corner of the chip). The leftmost wire goes to pin 2, the rightmost to pin 4.

Then, solder 2 wires to the dots from before:

Solder those 2 wires to pins 1 and 3 (pin 1 goes to the left dot, pin 2 the right dot)

Now on the other side of the chip, pin 14 (across from pin 1) gets a wire soldered to the spot shown in this picture:

Back on the front, solder from pin 7 a wire to the grounding point shown in the picture:

Now, make it all fit:

Success!