Switchless Region Mod

[thegardentool]

Who here has done the switchless region mod? I've found a few websites but nothing that I completely understand. I understand some of it but they don't have any detailing photos. It would be great if somebody here who has done one can take some good photos of where all the action is.

My white Saturn should be arriving soon and I would like to switchless mod it so I can play both my US games and future JPN purchases.

www.gamesx.com/importmod/sat_switchless.htm

[termis]

Have you ever tried the switch-mod? You pretty much have completely understand what's going on in the switch mod to understand what's going on with the switchless mod.

I don't know the exact logic gates of 74157 IC chip up there (And no need to even look it up unless you really wanna know how its doing the switching), but it's basically doing the work of the DPDT switch itself of the regular switch mod.

If you're not sure how the regular switch mod itself works, check out this little "switch"guide" I wrote up a long time ago - particularly the DPDT section, since these are used for US-JP region switches, and apply that to what you see in the switch mod above, and see how that works.

The reason why the author kept the description brief is because it'd be a pretty damn long description to detail out where each wire went for each motherboard revision.

[superdeadite]

If you send an email to www.ncsx.com, they are still willing to install region switches in Saturns. I think they only ask about $30 and it includes the return shipping. I have a friend that did this, they do nice work and usually only take a few days.

[thegardentool]

My white Saturn came in the mail today and I've been doing a little shell cleaning on it.

I found a place in Canada willing to chip, switchless region and inspect the Saturn for about $100USD. It'd rather spend as little as possible and keep the Saturn's appearance clean.

I do understand more or less a lot of it as I have done some wiring in the past just mostly car stereo wiring and soldering without harnesses. I get ground goes to ground, +5v to +5v but I do lack experience with switches. But don't we all lack this expertise before we do it for the first time?

I will probably try to find two controllers cheap locally for the IC 74157 instead of trying to order just two of them. This will give me a chance of doing it first to my original Saturn before attempting it on the import.

[termis]

Yeah, no better way of learning than just doing it yourself.

If you understand ground and +5, that's all good. Now, as for the switches, all that's the switch or IC chip will be doing is that it's reconfiguring the jumper points necessary for the saturn to think that it's from one region or another. I won't reinvent the wheel and explain what was explained on the gamesx site, but try reading it over real carefully and ask what part you don't understand and I'll try to explain it. As I said above, once you really understand what's going on there, applying that knowledge to the switchless mod shouldn't be that difficult.