Wonder Swan Color Screen Replacement:
I got gifted a couple of Wonder Swan handheld consoles a few years back with not the best of screens.
One of these was a Wonder Swan Color and these don’t have the easiest to see screens since they are not backlit and require fiddling with the contrast wheel and tilting the Wonder Swan at often strange angles to be able to see anything:
Recently Hispeedido (Chinese) developed a replacement IPS screen for only the Wonder Swan Color and I decided to give it a try to make mine playable.
Using a T7 Security Torx bit I disassembled my Wonder Swan Color:
Using some flat nosed tweezers carefully release the flex cable for the original screen:
Using a plastic spudger I also carefully pried up the original LCD and plastic lens which left me with a totally disassembled Wonder Swan Color:
New IPS LCD on the left compared to the original screen on the right:
And the original plastic lens on the right compared to the replacement one on the left:
Installation is fairly easy just requiring you to remove the white foam spacers,applying some isolation tape, applying some double sided tape and soldering two wires from the battery terminals to provide power and ground to the new screen:
NOTE:
The flex cable on these new screens appear to be very fragile so be very careful with it!
I had to get a replacement screen sent out to me as the first one I received was dodgy…
There are two “touch” sensors that adjust the brightness (TP1) and colour palette for black and white only titles (TP2). I found these to be very temperamental and often ended up palette cycling by accident (or even seemingly at random) but it appears to remember whatever you set it to on powering off the unit.
So after setting the brightness to my liking and making sure it was using the default colour palette I removed both of these sensors:
Another problem I found was since my Wonder Swan Color has a clear housing I could notice light bleeding through on the left side of the handheld:
So to help counter this I added some black electrical tape to that side of the screen:
It doesn’t 100% cure the back-light bleeding through the clear case but it is far less noticeable:
Comparison shots:
Final Fantasy 2 at Title on Original Screen:
Final Fantasy 2 at Title on New IPS Screen:
Final Fantasy 2 on World Map on Original Screen:
Final Fantasy 2 on World Map on New IPS Screen:
New IPS Screen with Black & White only Title:
However, it is not perfect. There is the temperamental sensor issue I mentioned previously for one.
Then battery drain appears to be much worse in comparison to using an original screen and you may now only get a couple of hours use out of the Wonder Swan Color from one AA battery.
I am also noticing when the screen flashes pure white that there appears to be an occasional v-sync tear in the middle of the screen.
The good is that this is easily reversible back to an original screen if you ever wished and It is really nice being able to actually comfortably see the screen now.