Bought a few GBA SP’s in a lot a few weeks back, I had this issue with 2 of them. The orange charge-light would come on briefly for about 1 second then turn off. Over the last few years I’ve heard everything from “bridge/replace the F1 fuse” to “replace the charging port”, but I think I can safely safe 9 times out of 10 it’s just the battery that’s dead. I just finished fixing these 2 GBA’s and both of them work fine now that I put in good replacement batteries. The charge light stays on while charging. Advice; - Check the charge port contacts to make sure they’re clean and there’s no bent pins. If the power adapter charge-plug can’t touch the charge-port contacts of the GBA SP itself, it’s needs to be replaced. Sometimes if the connection is also loose you might need to “bend” the charging-cable while it’s plugged in to make full contact with the GBA SP’s charging port. If it still works then great, but you’ll probably need to replace it sooner or later if that’s the case. Give it a wiggle, see if that...

Can confirm it’s the potentiometers. If you’re looking at the motherboard and you see the two potentiometers near the volume dial of the motherboard, the one on the left is the top screen while the one on the right is the bottom screen. I’ve had some units where they only needed a small millimeter of a turn to the right to stop the flickering, and other units where I needed to tweak between each unit for the right power. In some cases it may be a balance of tweaking both to get one screen or both to stop flickering. Trial and error, but just turn up the Pots by a small degree each time until you reach a satisfactory conclusion.

I've been working on this issue for the last few months and I'll tell my findings so far so whoever is googling this answer might have success finding the root of the problem. Got a SNES console, originally it booted on with just a black screen. No sound, no picture. So I checked some forums out and a bunch of them said to deep-clean the console because it might just be a bad pin connection. Opened up the console, revealed the pin connector, cleaned it out with 99% isopropyl alcohol (Costco, 10$ gets you 4 good-sized bottles of the stuff,) as well as the contacts on the board where the Pin connector joins in. Turns out there was all sorts of dust and bits of debris in there, and once I cleaned it all up.. It turns on and boots the game! Open up your system. Clean the pin connector. Problem #2.... now the system starts up and loads any game I shove into it, but it only plays for a minute or two then randomly shuts the game off but the power is still flowing to the system (Red light is still on) This is the...