McWill GBC backlit LCD replacement; spoiler: not recommended

[mikejmoffitt]

Got this unit installed today.

The unit itself is well constructed, and the fit is great, so installation was no problem.

The LCD panel itself... doesn't look great, I think. I was not able to get a good viewing angle at any normal viewing distance, where black didn't start to look blue or purple, a bit brighter than the darkest details. Gives it an odd look that's unappealing.

Contrast isn't too good, and it's a bit underwhelming, even compared to an old DS Lite.

The thing that makes this unit viscerally offensive is that there's visible screen tearing. It appears that the unit uses a framebuffer, but doesn't double buffer nor run at a framerate based on the GBC's original framerate, so every so often an ugly tear rolls upwards on the screen.



I imagine I can't return this thing, but I've already removed it from my GBC. I'm pretty disappointed in what I got.

See the tear in action for yourself in this tiny video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=im4nyDud2fM

[Konsolkongen]

That's a shame. I think this could be corrected by overclocking the GBC very slightly to 59.94Hz, but that should really be part of the kit.

At the very least it's good to see that the panel scales properly without uneven pixels. The previous kit for Game Gear looked god awful.

[fernan1234]

Do the BennVenn and Western Embedded kits not have these issues, since they supposedly use the same LCD? Regardless I still would say that if you have to play on the original GBC but want it backlit it's better to just cram in there an AGS-101/clone screen. Like with these kits you'll end up with a smaller picture size than the original, but pixel density will be accurate (unlike these kits, which have 4x more pixels, so graphics do not look exactly the same), and it will run at the same refresh rate. Drawback is colors are awfully oversaturated, but then again I don't think these kits are supposed to get that much closer to original GBC colors anyway.