Botched Saturn region switch

Started by mercuris, August 12, 2006, 02:35:47 PM

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mercuris

I recently got a Saturn in a trade and it had a region switch installed. Unfortunately someone did a crappy soldering job on the switch and two of the wires fell off, along with the switch itself.

It has six wires that are soldered to 6 jumpers on the bottom of the motherboard of the Saturn. It plays the music from the Saturn games (real copies of NiGHTS and Virtua Fighter 2) I put into it but wont play the game itself.. It just says 'invalid disk format' and I can select to play the tracks from the cd.

I don't want my Saturn modded and I just want to be able to play US games, is there any way to disconnect all these wires and just get my Saturn working the way it's supposed to without having switches and crap in it?

Thanks

ido8bit

Just remove the switches and install the jumpers at the right positions to set it permanently to US.  The jumper diagrams are on the main GamesX site.  

I'd recommend you fix the switches though, a lot of great Saturn games are JAP only.  You don't need to read Japanese to shoot'em ups and fighting games.  


Nails

#2
I also stuffed up a mod attempt, but mine was a little more stupid.

It seems as though I may have cut the tracks FROM the jumper pairs 10/11 and 12/13.

I tried to trace them, and it looks like they join to pins 7 and 8 of the SEGA chip 315-5744.  (This link tells me it's the System Manager & Peripheral Control (SMPC)).

Could someone who's got a bit more experience following tracks verify this for me on their Saturn?

If that's the case, I can just lift the pins and connect either ground or +5V to them for the region mod, right?  (The 6/7 jumper pair are fine).

Also, a general n00b question about jumper pairs:

NFG

Yes, based on your diagram, the centre points are the same.  If you followed the traces you'd see they're connected and run to a single input on the SMPC chip.

Yes, you can attach the 0/+5 directly to the SMPC pins, tho do be careful.  THat's your last resort, you snap off a pin (not easy, no worries) and you're boned.