The screen swap was easy peasy, the hardest part was getting the old screen out. Mine was already broken, and I wasn’t keeping the front plastic, so I didn’t have to worry about being too careful, except around the top edge where the mics and ambient light sensor are.
The case swap was a bear, took forever. I’m fairly handy, but the whole process took almost 4 hours. My buddy was doing his in tandem with me and he was over 5 hours, and that’s with me lending a hand towards the end.
It looks great, in my opinion, and I’d do it again, I’d just start earlier in the day 😬
As far as the OLED goes, so far it looks good. The stock brightness slider isn’t working, it must be a software thing? I have had zero time to look into it. I haven’t even played a single game on it since doing the swap. I’ll report back when I have time to give it a fair shake.
I think it’d be really cool if, once there’s a bunch of Decks with broken screens and stuff, there’s a community around building new devices with them. There’s no reason it needs to be the same size screen, or even the same controller format. It’d be cool to have like GameBoy size versions (assuming the hardware can be compacted that small, which it probably can’t), or even larger versions. I’d love to see someone print out a Deck case that’s scaled for a laptop screen, for example. There’s no reason that can’t be made easy with parameterized models.
This one is a custom case with a custom screen, except they chose to make it a copy of the Deck. That’s great if you want it, but it’d be cool to have options.