This might be useful if anyone is thinking of getting one or adding some personalised flavour to the lovely micro.

Lenses

OEM (and refurbished) lenses are gold dust and if you have an original in good nick - then hold on to it - they're worth a lot on trade.

From the 7 after market lenses I've bought, there's definitely two main moulds - the transparent and the non-transparent versions.

Transparent ones I've had often had marks on them that needed either cleaning off or rubbing enough that you can ignore it.

Stickers

The sticker adds 0.2mm of thickness to the front of the Micro, which, is quite a lot considering how small everything is.

If the lens is slightly too thick, or the sticker is more than .2mm, then the A/B buttons can feel either completely flush (which is a little weird) - but it's entirely hit an miss.

I've bought stickers from these three (I'm sure there's more):

All these stores, regardless of where they were based took at least two weeks to ship (I'm guessing the UK based ones are printing on demand…).

The sticker quality is superb, but the application process is also important, and Retro Game Evo (and therefore Lab15) used the same method where the viewport, button holes, dpad, etc were cut out - which meant application was much simpler and importantly: accurate.

Though the Lab15 came from Retro Game Evo, the fit seemed to be much better from Lab15. What I mean is the sticker didn't sit over the display or the button holes.

I definitely found that transparent faceplates have slightly different tolerances to non-transparent, and in general, I prefer solid black face plates as they also tend to hide the tolerances in the sticker.

The sticker on the black face plate was from Next Stop Please - I had three of these and two had the same overlap on the viewport.

Shoulder buttons

Shoulder buttons come from a single mould and have a design mistake. I didn't discover it, but tucked away in a discord channel.

The problem is that the mould for after market shoulder buttons make them stick (or no longer clicky). You need to snip a very small section on the outside edge (see picture in discord) and then it works perfectly.

Battery mod

I've done this with all the Micros I've owned and refurbed because new longer batteries are better all round. Makho explains the process on YouTube which, if you're comfortable with soldering, you snip the connector off the original battery, and then splice or solder on a lipo 802535 battery (you can find these on Ebay for about £7/$8 …yeesh, the exchange rate 🤦‍♂️) - which will give you 800mAh.

Charging mod

There's two choices here, you can easily find USB to Game Boy Micro charging leads for cheap on ebay, or if you don't want to keep track of a single special lead and don't care about the game link, you can put a USBC port directly on to the board (again, soldering skills required).

Natalie the Nerd has an excellent blog post on the process - what's important is that you source USBC ports with 6 pins.

I also found it useful, instead of hot glue (as suggested in the post) instead to flair the (front) legs of the USBC port so that it can be soldered directly to the board making it extra secure.