I swapped my WonderSwan screen for an IPS one
Back in March, I said I bought a WonderSwan Color. I barely turned it on because (a) its games are only in Japanese, since it was released only in Japan; (b) the only game I had was Final Fantasy II (in Japanese); and © I could barely see the screen.
Maybe younger people don't know about this, but old handhelds didn't have any backlighting, so you had to play it under a strong source of light to see anything, and it was not great. Here's a picture of my WonderSwan running Final Fantasy II. It was taken during the day, in a bright room with an overhead lamp turned on. Magnificent, isn't it?
And now here it is with an IPS screen bought from AliExpress, at minimum brightness, in a dark room.
It's a world of difference. Of course, now the single AA battery will last way less than before — I still don't know by how much — but at least it's playable. The screen ended up a bit too far to the left, but since it has a larger internal frame than the original one, I'm not sure it can be changed as there's no room left inside. Nonetheless, the handheld is playable.
And since I don't speak Japanese, I also bought a flashcart (apparently, a Chinese copy of a famous one called Flashmasta) and a flasher, so I could load ROMs with English fan translation into it. It's an... interesting setup, to say the least. Kinda finicky, but it works. Here's what it looks like.
(Yes, that's a piece of cardboard holding the flashcart in place.)
Earlier this year, a better flashcart called Nileswan was released, which uses an SD Card to load the ROMs and has a USB connection. However, it's apparently made by hand by one person, and I couldn't grab one in time before it was sold out (the stock lasted, like, 1 minute, lol). Hopefully I'm luckier next time.
For now, tho, I'm gonna enjoy the 7 ROMs I can load into this thing and play around with it a bit. I miss handhelds that could fit in your pocket.