Reader Reviews
It's back. There's no stopping it.
Afterburner (GBA)
by Alastair
Unless you live on the sun, or have 100W bulbs in every light socket in your home, you'll have noticed that the GBA screen is a little hard to make out in low light situations - enter the Afterburner. The Afterburner is a hardware mod for the GBA which provides a light source in front of the screen and is powered by the GBA's own batteries.
Having watched my father do some soldering when I was a lad, I felt up to the task of fitting one of these myself and duly ordered a kit and got hold of a soldering iron. Following the advice in the supplied fitting manual, I set myself up in my newly cleaned bathroom, as it's the least dusty room in the flat, and set about taking my GBA apart.
The first main modification to make involves cutting parts of the front casing away to make room for the lighting panel. I used a rotary engraving tool, which did the job admirably and I managed to avoid the horror of removing too much material. Next main task was fitting the anti-reflective film to the LCD screen. A fine chance to plaster the inside of your GBA with sweaty fingerprints! I however, took the precaution of wearing rubber gloves and suffered no such misfortune.
Now we come to the meat and potatoes of the task – soldering. Soldering whilst kneeling down on the bathroom floor, pins and needles making your feet feel like huge blocks of foot on the end of your legs, is no easy task. Eventually I decided to run the gauntlet of dust and complete the soldering at my comfy kitchen table.
Suddenly, the soldering became a relative doddle, although not such a doddle that I wanted to fit the supplied dimmer wheel! All in all the job took me several hours, but the results were unarguably worth it. Battery life is definitely down and there are a few specks of dust visible on the screen but luckily they're at the edge and once I start playing I never noticed them. All of these negatives are far outweighed by the joy of being able to see the screen in any lighting conditions. Several readers (and even your favourite editor) of Eurogamer have seen my front lit GBA, and all seemed impressed to a greater or lesser degree [true and true -Ed].