Replacing GBC Cart Battery
Hey All,
So I haven't soldered in over 10 years but just recently I dug out my old GB/GBC/GBA games and I found a number of them have dead batteries so all of my saves are gone for those games. ðŸ˜
I'm bought all the stuff I need to replace the batteries but the batteries themselves. Does anyone have a good place to get tabbed batteries? I was going to get them from amazon but wanted to see if there was a better place. I think most of the games I need to replace are CR2025's but there may be a few CR1616's too.
Hopefully this is the right community to ask this in.
Thanks!
9 replies
Digikey and mouser are the main places to get tabbed batteries. I don't worry about soldering a holder in as it takes 20 seconds to solder in a new tabbed battery and it's cheaper.
Don't put another tabbed battery in, put a cr2025 slot in there so you can replace them more easily in future.
Oh I hadn't considered that. Thanks!
GBwiki recommends DigiKey for OEM quality batteries.
I'll check them out, thanks.
well according to ifixit you need CR2032's for replacing the battery from Gameboy Modules (and CR1616's for GBA Modules.)
Do you have a local hardware and or electronics store? Maybe even a drugstore?
I do have a micro center kind of near me but when I looked on their website they didn't have any tabbed batteries available. However, as someone else pointed out, I need to look into getting a bracket instead so I can swap the batteries more easily of necessary. Maybe micro center has those, I haven't looked yet.
In my experience, microcenter doesn't have much in the way of component level stuff. All I've ever seen at my local store and on their website all seems like stuff just meant for breadboarding small circuits, usually for working with an RPi or Arduino. I've never seen them carry surface mount components, but you may have better luck than me.
There are plenty of sites which carry plenty of retro game repair components which should include those battery slots.
The size you need is entirely dependent on the game. Pokemon Red and Blue both use CR2025's, whereas Pokemon Yellow uses a CR1616. GBA games often use flash memory instead of SRAM so they don't usually need their batteries changed for the actual saves, but usually for an RTC if the game has one.
In my personal experience local stores usually have batteries in the right sizes, but I've never seen them have tabbed batteries.