Your Game Boy screen is scratched or hazy
94MER / Repair Guides / Game Boy
Game Boy · Symptom guide
The screen looks scratched, cloudy or scuffed and games are hard to read in bright light.
What you are looking at is a thin plastic lens sitting in front of the actual LCD. It takes every scratch so the screen does not. People assume a scratched screen means a dead console, when the part that is damaged costs a few dollars and peels off.
Check this before you buy anything
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Clean it properly first
A microfibre cloth and a little isopropyl. Years of grime looks a lot like haze and comes off for nothing.
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Tilt it to the light
If the marks sit on the very front surface and catch your fingernail, it is the lens. If the damage looks like it is underneath, inside the display, that is the LCD and a lens will not help.
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Check for dead lines or a black blot
Lines across the display or a dark spreading patch are LCD faults, not lens faults.
If every one of those comes back clean, now it is worth buying a part.
If that did not fix it, here is the part
Before you order
The original Game Boy DMG and the Game Boy Advance take different lenses. Adhesive is already applied on both.
What this is not
A lens will not fix dead pixel lines, a bleeding display, or a screen that needs a smack to come on. Those are LCD and capacitor faults.
Related faults
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