Sorry, but I fail to understand why you would not just buy a RG35xx of something similar? The purple transparent RG35xx looks so much like this GBC. But with a much better display, battery, you can play everything from NES to PSX on it, etc… Not to mention that is much cheaper! I like retro gaming, but I guess I’m not a purist like some. I prefer to play my retro games with the luxury of savestates and a better display.
You came late to the modding scene then. I bought mine secondhand so I had a PSP with firmware 1.52 that could be modded. Since the newer 2.0 firmware was still unhackable. (soon after you could mod version 2.0 with a gta savegame hack)
So many good memories. I really loved the PSP modding scene.