The Super Famicom - Can we make the GOAT even GOAT'ier?

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For me, the greatest console of all time is the Super Nintendo. Hit after hit game, beautiful graphics, gorgeous sound, wonderful controller, gorgeous console to look at (not you America!)….it's just an absolutely iconic machine. However, all of that has been said already countless times, by many many people. What I'd like to do, is see what the modern improvements are like and what they can add to what is essentially, retro royalty….let's crack on.

^^ The Super Famicom, which is the Japanese version of the Super Nintendo. This one is minty fresh, no yellowing that I can see, and is in immaculate condition.

^^ The first set of upgrades. An RGB scart cable for best picture quality, and a modern regulated power supply, so none of that stepdown business here. I try buy all my modern/replacement psu's from RetroGameSupply - he does brilliant quality, highly regarded power supplies for all manner of machines - https://en.retrogamesupply.com/ .

^^ A quick test before we do anything to it, just to ensure all's well, which it is.

^^ Shell off, and mainboard removed. This is the seemingly fabled 1chip model. What this does, is integrate the PPU chips and the CPU into one single chip. Funnily enough, this was done near the end of the life of the console as a cost cutting measure, but one positive is, the video output from these units is highly highly regarded. One negative though, is there's a handful of games which exhibit glitches etc with this model (Turrican comes to mind.) So you win some, you lose some. None of the affected games are ones I'd be interested in, so for me, I'm ok with this. There's also annecdotal evidence that these 1chip models may be more reliable than the earlier versions, some of which now you'll find are failing. Hard to say conclusively if this is true, but given there are no replacements for these custom chips, I'll roll the dice on increased reliability every day!

^^ A bit dusty, but otherwise all looks in good condition. These original capacitors don't appear to be leaking yet, but given their age, I think I'll change them for new ones.

^^ A capacitor and power refresh kit from eBay. I won't bother with the fuse and new voltage regulator here, the original ones are perfectly fine as is and there's no need/benefit in changing them until required.

^^ Old smd caps removed with the hot air gun, and the few through hole ones were made short work of with the desoldering gun…

^^ Area and solder pads cleaned, and wicked of all old solder. This means the new caps will sit flush to the board, and the new solder will take/set very nicely this way too.

^^ New caps soldered into position.

^^ Time to test before proceeding. Experience has thought me not to be lazy and always test after every stage of a job. I have on occasion done a raft of work to a machine only to test it at the end, for it not to work, and having no idea where to begin troubleshooting as I'd made so many changes. This way, testing after every step gives you an idea of what is likely wrong as it's the last thing you done!

^^ Sweet, working away perfectly. The image is razor sharp in person, but there's no glory in shunting a retro console directly into a modern display…I can't wait to see this over RGB on my Trinitron, but alas, that'll have to wait!

^^ Ok just rewinding time a little here, if I test a PAL Super Nintendo game on this Super Famicom, the unit obviously powers up…but I get no video output at all. Why's that? Well its the region protection of course. The Super Nintendo is region protected, meaning NTSC games won't work on a PAL system and vice versa. There's also 50/60Hz protection checks that happen too to ensure you're not being a bold kid and importing cheap games, thanks Nintendo!

The older way of getting around this, is to fit two switches to the machine. One to switch between PAL/NTSC, and one to switch between 50/60Hz. For years this was seen as a great way of making your Super Nintendo region free. Some games though have nefarious enough protection that they can detect various mismatches in timings etc that the switch mods can't account for, so while the switch mod still works great to this day, it's not comprehensively successful, and as such newer methods have been developed to improve things.

Similarly, you can't get true 60Hz from a 50Hz machine, and true 50Hz from a 60Hz machine because they've only a single crystal oscillator on board. These tiny timing differences do count, and I believe the above mentioned protection checks hone in on these subtle inaccuracies. The more modern solutions have what's called a DFO, or dual frequency oscillator, giving true 50/60Hz output from any machine. So without further ado, let's introduce this Super Famicom to its new companion…

^^ This, is the wonderfully and beuatifully designed SuperCiC Multi Region board. This is designed by borti4938, and features a veritable raft of improvements:

• SuperCiC security protection defeated - so ALL games will run, regardless of region. This protection is defeated at a really low level, and is comprehensively successful.
• uIGR built in - or, In Game Reset. The board can 'sniff' the controller inputs, giving you various hotkeys available via the controller like full reset, soft reset, region changes, etc.
• Region Patching - An obvious one, all region games will now play regardless of their region.
• Dejitter - Some display chains are affected by a jitter/wobble, so this eliminates it.
• DFO - as explained above, a dual frequency oscillator is on board, so we can now get TRUE 50/60Hz, and as a result, display timings will be perfect.

Further, a multi-coloured LED will replace the original. Now I'm not a fan of LED mods, I get nasty flashback from when I originally learned to solder and went an a 'blue led spree'. However, in this case I think it's tastefully justified. The RED colour will be used to denote NTSC/60Hz, which is what the console will likely be used for 99.9% of the time, so no changes there. GREEN is used for PAL/50Hz, and the YELLOW will be used for AUTO detection, meaning the mod board will determine what the cart expects, and will match the settings accordingly.

^^ The first step is to replace the LED. Now, best practice here is to desolder all 14 controller port pins, and the two for the LED, and remove the LED this way. Lazyness however, suggests you can remove it without desoldering all those pins….so let's ask lazyness to put its money where its mouth is…

^^ LED desoldered. It's sitting there loosely now, but can I remove it?

^^ Grand, all done. Not a particularly easy removal as you can tell by the legs of the LED itself, but it's out!

^^ The new multi coloured LED. I've splayed the legs out so I can judge where to cut them etc.

^^ I'll be fitting this new LED on the front side of the controller board, unlike the original. This will make it much easier to place. It's orientation then for the top shell isn't affected at all, so it's all good. The center/ground leg here is soldered to the ground position on the board, and this will hold the LED in place. There's no stress or pressure whatsoever on this LED, so the solder joint will hold it in place perfectly fine.

^^ I've now trimmed the legs for RED and GREEN, and they're sitting above the board not connected to anything. That's because the new mod board will power and control this LED, the original controller board no longer needs to do anything with it.

^^ Colour matched wires soldered onto the LED, and some protective heat shrinking in place to ensure there's never any contact with between the controller board and new LED pins.

^^ Next up, we need to remove some original components related to security etc. The CiC chip, which relates to authenticity checks etc. These checks will later be bypassed, so we need to remove this chip (you can leave it in place and just lift certain legs, but it's probably easier to hot air it off in my opinion.)

^^ I protect the reset button here with some kapton tape, as we'll be using the hot air station to remove the chip in question.

^^ Done, chip removed. I then wicked the pads clean of old solder, and cleaned them with IPA. We'll be soldering to two of them later on so it's important they're clean.

^^ Next up for removal is the original 60Hz crystal oscillator. As the new mod board will have a DFO integrated, this original one is redundant & has to be removed so the new one can take over.

^^ Done, easy work with the desoldering gun.

^^ Next we need to lift a pin on the CPU, so we're over to the microscope for this. It can be done without magnification, but these ageing eyes are much, much happier with the assistance of the scope. We switch to a finer tip on the soldering iron, and a scalpel to be able to gently lift the pin once the solder is molten.

^^ Pin 111, I've added some liquid flux here and added some fresh solder to it (pic courtesy of the microscope.)

^^ And now lifted. It annoyingly took the pad up with it, but the pad isn't required as it just attaches to that large plane so its inconsequential really. With finer pitch soldering iron tips, I find it much harder to get thermal transfer, so I imagine what happened is the solder wasn't fully molten as I was lifting the pin, despite the addition of flux and fresh solder.

^^ Pic of the lifted pin from my phone.It's nicely clear of the pad so soldering to it won't be an issue later on.

^^ Next on the S-RGB chip, we need to lift pins 7 & 9.

^^ Bad picture, but it's done here.

^^ Ok, that's all the prep work mostly done. It's time to solder the new mod board into place. I've insulated a few small components here with some kapton tape incase the mod board were to make contact with any of them.

^^ The board sits atop the existing cart slot pins, and select ones are soldered to the matching pins. It's a lovely solution it must be said, and saves a rats nest of small wires.

^^ Other side done…

^^ That's it soldered into position. The instructions say to try leave a small gap between the mod board and the mainboard, likely to prevent contact with the resistors etc under the kapton tape. This means the kapton tape is largely redundant, but will serve as a backup layer of protection!

^^ Using 30ag kynar wire, it fits perfectly through the vias on the board. This will make cable routing easier and neater. Shown here are the two wires soldered to where the original CiC chip was.

^^ Same here, kynar through the via and onto the lifted CPU pin.

^^ And lastly the S-RGB chip has its three wires conencted to it now (one to each lifted pin, and one to one of the lifted pin pads.)

^^ We then begin soldering the relevant wires to their respective pads on the mod board.

^^ Before long, we've a nice neat and tidy installation. I'm still not great with getting perfect wire lengths etc, but I was happy with this and feel it was an improvement over past efforts.

^^ Ok, time for a test….moment of truth stuff here.

^^ Ok, it powers on without smoke and fireworks which is always a relief. The LED is showing as YELLOW (Orange in reality, which means it's letting the cart determine what mode the console runs in), which is also good as it's an NTSC-J game inserted and the output is at 60Hz…

^^ Ok, it appears quite happy to play games from its own region. This is good because it means with the original CiC chip removed, the security protection is now defeated, and also the new DFO is obviously working as it should too. Will it play games from the PAL region though??

^^ Ok, we're still in auto mode, so this should set the console as a PAL/50Hz machine now…

^^ Hmm, ok, problems. The console region isn't changing, damn.

After some troubleshooting, I narrowed the issue down to this part of the instructions:

"either close SJ11 or connect Clk.CIC to the footprint of C74 (left pad)"

^^ My board didn't have a C74 as per the pic in the instructions. It had a C72, which was in the exact same position but I didn't want to chance it so I just closed the jumper on the board as described. This didn't work for whatever reason, so I just yolo'd it and connected to the mod board to my C72 instead…

^^ We try again now with C72 connected, and the jumper disconnected…

^^ Boom, it works perfectly. Booting the machine as a PAL region machine, with 50Hz output from the DFO.

^^ If I set the console manually to be an NTSC/60Hz machine, it'll play PAL games in that configuration too, regardless of their region. So it's truly region free now, with the ability to output a correct 50Hz, and a correct 60Hz too.

^^ Holding reset, allows you to change region. GREEN is PAL/50Hz…

^^ ORANGE is Auto (allowing the cart determine what it needs)…

^^ And RED is NTSC-60Hz (the ORANGE shown above and RED in this pic look very similar here)

^^ Next up we've one final alteration to make. The brightness fix - 1chip Snes consoles output a slightly too bright image which can look slightly washed out, but thankfully the fix is quite easy. We need to solder three resistors to three points on the mainboard. Can you guess which three points we need to solder to???

^^ Why of course….OF COURSE it was R6, R7, & R8…the three exact points I used to feed wires through. These need to be rerouted through different via's now, which is annoying. I've then tinned the three points in question, ready to solder resistors to.

^^ I grab some resistors, and double check they're the rated resistance. They're reading as 738, which are within spec and will do the job nicely.

^^ All done.

^^ Back together and testing away perfectly. I can't see any real difference with the brightness fix done, but maybe it comes more into play on CRT's etc? Anyway, it's done!

^^ All three settings. I'll likely leave it on RED (first image, it looks very intense here but it's identical to the original red in person.) GREEN looks nice too, but it's only ever needed to play PAL optimised games really, as any others will happily play at 60Hz. ORANGE will let the cart decide.

All done!

Info on the mod here - https://github.com/borti4938/SNES_MultiRegion_with_DeJitter_QID/tree/master

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It's funny what you notice when looking back at pictures? Remember I mentioned about the CPU pin lifting up with its pad still attached? Well, it occurred to me that I don't remember taking the lifted pad away off the board. They're obviously conductive, so not something you want floating about inside a console. Well, in one of the above pics….I spotted it! It's in behind the pins of the CPU somehow!

^^ See it there at the end of the red arrow? Hiding in the shadows, waiting to cause a short someday and ruin all my work!

^^ Scalpel to the rescue! I was able to fish it out, and dispose of it properly.

^^ While I had the stuff out again, I remembered I'd x4 controller refresh kits. So I decided to just swap out all of the old, tired, worn out, and broken in one case, button membranes.

^^ An example of some of the broken original pads. The controls felt flat, and unresponsive with this.

^^ Literally falling apart. It's a simply matter to swap in the new pads. The only issue is all of the new L & R pads are really crap and don't work properly at all. Thankfully the original ones all seem fine, so I just left them in place.

^^ All done, for good this time!