After Burner
04/06 '09
A blast from the past – 2001. Before the days of back-lit or even front-lit GBA’s, us super nerds had to resort to a product called After Burner which required user installation and a special screw driver (sold separately).
This photo was taken moments after I spent 3 hours of soldering and burning away excess plastic.
A few months later a company popped up and sold pre-installed After Burner GBA’s for a very reasonable price ( yourhappyplace.com – no longer live ). Good times.
Here’s my original AB review written on 10-15-2002:
First off, I would like to say that this is a really great add-on for the GBA and I would like to thank Triton Labs for creating such an innovative accessory. I love my Afterburner and I’m glad that I installed it.
Installation
Everything in the manual is written pretty well with only a few errors. I wish that there were actual pictures rather than illustrations for each step so that we could see how the GBA is supposed to look throughout the procedure.
My first real beef with the instructions was that it said that a Dremel Tool would be useful in removing the plastic to make the AB fit. Well, since Dremel is a brand name and they make dozens of types of tools, the instructions really didn’t help me. I bought a Dremel Tool but it was a wood/plastic burning tool that doubled as a soldering iron. I thought I was killing two birds with one stone but I soon found out that burning the plastic was much harder than just cutting it away. It ended up working out in the end but it was still very tedious and annoying.
And then came the soldering. This was the first time that I ever used a soldering iron and it wasn’t very pretty. The solder points that need to be made are very tiny and extremely difficult to accomplish. I’m not happy with the job that I did and I’m very surprised that my AB works at all after my horrendous attempts.
Now came the placing of the AB in the case. This step was much more difficult than I though it would be. I tried several times to get the darn thing to line up correctly but I just couldn’t do it. Every time that I locked the LCD in place it would miss align the AB. I finally gave up and left it a little off centered. It’s hard to tell that it is installed a little crooked, but it sucks knowing that I couldn’t get it perfect. I think if it came with a plastic guide or some adhesive form tape or something this would have made installation a little easier and much more accurate.
I seemed to have finally got the darn thing installed and I put the case back together and popped in my batteries for a test run. To my surprise, everything powered up fine and the light actually worked. I finished tightening the screws and tried to play a game. The first thing that I noticed was that the colors were really washed out and text was nearly impossible to read. All of the reviews that I read so far seemed to be happening to me too. I decided to take the GBA apart again and take the plastic shield off of the AB because I thought that that was the culprit. When I got to the AB and started picking at the plastic, I noticed that a small piece came up really easily and peeled off entirely. I must have forgotten to take the other side of the protective covering off and that was causing the distortion. I put the GBA back together again and tried playing Super Mario Advanced and it looked absolutely beautiful. I was very, very impressed at the quality and consistency of the light.
Results
In the end the AB kit turned out OK but I needed too many tools to complete the installation. Since I had to take my GBA apart 2 times and I had to fiddle with the positioning of the light so much and had to remove the protective plastic from the overlay piece I introduced a lot of dust particles. My installation is pretty poor as a result and it kind of sucks playing darker games on it when you can see all of the dust.
If I could do it all over again I would have waited and bought a GBA with the AB pre-installed by a professional.
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