I got a Freeplay CM3 board from good ol' Ed Mandy mid-late last year, and I hadn't wanted to put it together because I had attempted to cut my first case and... well there was a lot less case when I was done, and it still didn't fit. That case was my burner, but it had gone so terribly I lost all confidence and just sort of threw up my hands and tossed it to the side.
Well, circumstances led me to need an emulation device for a road trip with my family so I got cracking on my new one.
I bought a grey case from RetroModding.com and all the buttons for an SNES-type build when I bought the Freeplay, only being fresh into this community and not understanding how... ubiquitous, we'll say, that design is. I decided I didn't want that anymore, I wanted to make it blue and use the grey buttons I already had from my cheap burner case.
I should say if you want to build one of these, you should follow Hipcat's build series on YouTube, he is obviously much more adept at this than me
The Case Cutting:
Screen fitting.
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Don't give me that look, okay?
In fact, I have so little experience with dremels that I only have this dremel with an EU plug, so I needed to remedy that, janky style.
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After fitting the board - extensively - I took some ribbon wire and hooked up the PSP joysticks, and soldered them to the back of the board.
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Now obviously the start/select buttons won't be accessible with the placement of the left thumbstick, so I drilled two holes in the bottom bezel of the GBA, under the screen.
My partner's a painter and got pretty excited to paint it, so they slopped on some primer and made most of it white.
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Thanks for reading!