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easier, undocumented 50/60hz mod?

AG Wolf - Feb 26, 2013

		AG Wolf		Feb 26, 2013
			Long story short, I decided to clean up the messy wiring/installation job I had done on all my different Saturn mods over the course of the last 14 years. At one point, I had done the Pin 79 mod just for sake of completion (I live in an NTSC territory, and I don't think there are any PAL-optimized titles that I would really concern myself with...) So I reconnected the trace I had cut next to the leg of the chip, and decided I'd try to follow the trace and find a safer/sturdier spot to solder a wire. Lo and behold, that leg of the IC goes right to a jumper on the underside of the board. This was where I had originally connected a wire; instead of lifting the pin, I had just cut the trace before it hit the pass-through to the other side of the board. Sloppy: (I reconnected the trace before following it to the jumper block.) This is where the trace starts on the bottom (black arrow), and it goes about an inch over to JP1/JP2: This is on an NTSC US Saturn, so JP1 must be NTSC, and JP2 must be PAL. I cut the trace on JP1, and wired their common-point (the one that goes back to Pin 79) to the center of an SPDT switch. I sourced 5v and Ground from one of my other mods, and it worked just fine. I've been inside many different model Saturns, but never attempted the 50/60hz mod on anything other than this specific machine. My motherboard is VA11 (console manufacture date of February 1997), but I know the jumpers for region-modding are all labeled the same across older designs (despite having different location/layout), so maybe this JP1/2 block exists on other boards with the same function? I don't know if this has been documented before or not, but I never saw it anywhere online after all this time, so I figured I'd make some kind of post about it. It's just a lot easier using the jumper block than playing games with the leg of the chip itself (or maybe the last year of borderline alcoholism has hindered my ability to keep my hands steady enough to solder something that small lol )

		AG Wolf		Feb 26, 2013
			Apparently it has been documented on the French Saturn megasite, Segakore: http://www.segakore.fr/articles/switch_sat_p2.html... but I guess nobody has ever made mention of it in English anywhere lol I ran it through Google Translate, and it seems like there are a number of variables involved... apparently JP1/2 controls more than just video frequency on certain models? I wish I had the resources available to investigate further, but for the mean-time it seems like the jumper method worked just fine on my machine at least.

		antime		Feb 26, 2013
			The "old" way of doing the mod involved cutting the trace on the bottom trace and soldering a wire to the via, as described here.... On at least some boards, one of the two pads labelled JP1/JP2 on your board will be populated with a pullup/pulldown resistor (the names vary between revisions). Depending on hardware revision, there's an even easier mod....