One of the secret benefits to living in Japan that the government doesn't inform you of when you get your visa is that Aliexpress shipments don't take a million years to get to your door because as it turns out, Japan is a lot closer to China than the continental US. Who would've thought, right? Geography, wild!
Anyway, one of the things that was in my latest Aliexpress shipment was an IPS kit for the Wonderswan Color. I own a Crystal and it's a very handsome system in person, but my lights in this apartment are such that I'd have to deal with major screen glare anywhere I could play it, hence why I ended up getting a Color on the cheap and this screen kit. Since I wrapped up work early tonight, I decided I'd go ahead and throw it all together. And despite once again taking longer than I would care to admit as someone who's still a soldering novice, all told, it was relatively painless to put together and the results speak for themselves. The hype for these things is pretty legitimate; the colors really do pop, even on the dimmest setting! My kit came with a replacement screen lens that I didn't install this time around since I thought it was superfluous, but it does look like the original lens blocks out just the tiniest bit off the top, so I probably will crack it open again later and replace that as well. But for now, I'm content!
That makes it three for three when it comes to successful mods I've installed onto my consoles thus far, which feels pretty good as someone who used to think soldering would always be completely beyond me! For those who understandably haven't been keeping track, I've also done a GBA SP IPS screen replacement and also the more basic N64 RGB output mod. All of them I'd say are doable enough with the sort of basic skills that I have, but for anyone else at a similar skill level looking to dabble with this stuff, I'd say this is overall the easiest of the bunch by a fairly wide margin. The N64 and GBA both require pretty extensive teardowns to do those respective mods, which leaves a lot of room for error when it comes to reassembling everything correctly. I still made one dumb mistake with one of the button membranes on my Wonderswan Color, but otherwise I'd say it's a lot less time consuming to take apart and put back together. Just six screws and a ribbon cable to unlatch and then you're on you're on your way.
A lot of that is also thanks to this excellent tutorial from Tito Perez of Macho Nacho Productions. I find the main documentation that's circulating for this mod to be overly vague for someone of my skill level and Tito's video helped me get through it all in one piece. Tito is one of the few gaming YouTubers I follow in general because he puts out a lot of beautifully filmed, well-narrated videos about various mods that are just fun to watch, even for stuff I'm not interested in working on. His videos are directly responsible for giving me the confidence to try this stuff in the first place, so suffice it to say, I can't recommend him enough if you have even just the slightest interest in the scene.
Either way, definitely excited to finally start digging into this library now that I can play this system a lot more comfortably. I've got my eye on a couple of raising sim ports in particular that I suspect play great on that form factor, so expect more Wonderswan coverage moving forward. 
