I Messed Something Up (GBA)

So I bought a bunch of DS, DSis, and GBAs off my sister. They all "worked" supposedly. So the first one I tested was the GBA. It worked fine, except after playing for, say, 10-15 minutes it would just randomly crash - power would still work, but the game would just go haywire. Not having any real experience with this kind of thing, I decided to just take the thing apart and take a look (I paid nearly nothing for it so I had had nothing to lose haha).

So I took it apart and cleaned it and I also tightened the batter cover (this is an Advance SP by the way). And when I cut it on it worked perfectly - except after the first use the screen is no longer bright. It looks like garbage. I'm not sure if it's the front or backlit model (if it's necessary information, I can get it when I get home).

So anyway, does anyone know what I may have done? What's odd is, it wasn't until my second or third time playing that the screen went dim on me. So any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

EDIT: So I stopped at the house. It is a frontlit model. And I fired it up just to check and it's behaving strangely. It powers on very dim, then I can hit the brightness button and it goes black and then a second press will cause it to brighten like it's supposed to. Unfortunately now the sound is going in and out. My apologies if my knowledge of the the specifics of this device is a little slim - I was never a huge GBA fan. This is the first one I've honestly ever used, let alone tried to fix. Once again, thank you for any suggestions!

 

It might be a bad motherboard or a bad speaker/screen. If that is not resolved, you may as well get a new unit. They go for pretty cheap now on eBay or amazon.

 

Actually, I found a suggestion, I think on youtube, that I should take it apart and bend the tabs on the speaker up because sometimes they flatten out and start having issues. And so far so good, it seems to have work. And as for the screen, when I put it back together, I haven't had any issues. So as far as I can see, it's fixed. I just wanted to post an update in case anyone else read this and had the same issue.

Thank you though!

Dakota

 

Glad it worked out