Basic Switch Guide

[termis]

Okay, so after seeing MH's basic soldering guide, I thought this would also be helpful to those who might wanna try their hand at modding. 

Here are the four common switches that you'll find in your local radio shack or whatnot.  All this stuff is self-taught for me, so please feel free to correct me if I'm horribly wrong somewhere.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

1. SPST - Single Pole, Single Throw.
Will have 2 contact points on the switch.
+-----+
|     |
+-----+
 |   |
 1   2

When in "on" position, it will connect what's on contacts 1 and 2.
When in "off" position, it will disconnect the what's on contacts 1 and 2.

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2. DPST - Double Pole, Single Throw
Will have 4 contact points on the switch.
This is essentially the same as having 2 SPST switches, controlled by a single switch.

 1   2
 |   |
+-----+
|     |
+-----+
 |   |
 3   4

When in "on" position, it will connect what's on contacts 1 with 2; and 3 with 4.
when in "off" position, everything will be disconnected with each other.

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3. SPDT - Single Pole, Double Throw.
Will have 3 contact points on the switch.
+-----+
|     |
+-----+
 | | |
 1 2 3

"on-on" SPDT switches will have 2 possible positions on the switch.
Flip the switch to one side, and it will connect what's on contacts 1 and 2.
Flip the switch to the other side, and it will connect what's on contacts 2 and 3.

Some SPDT switches might be labled "on-off-on" (or "center-off"), which in case the switch will have 3 possible positions.  In this case, the "off" position will leave contacts 1,2, and 3 all disconnected from each other.

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4. DPDT - Double Pole, Double Throw
Will have 6 contact points on the switch.
This is essentially the same as having 2 SPDT switches, controlled by a single switch.

 1 2 3
 | | |
+-----+
|     |
+-----+
 | | |
 4 5 6

"on-on" DPDT switches will have 2 possible positions.
Flip the switch to one side, and it will connect what's on contacts 1 with 2; and 4 with 5.
Flip the switch to the other side, and it will connect what's on contacts 2 with 3; and 5 with 6.

Some DPDT switches might be labled "on-off-on" (or "center-off"), which in case the switch will have 3 possible positions.  In this case, the "off" position will leave all 6 contacts disconnected with each other.

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So if you understood the 4 common type switches above, you'll see what's the switches are actually doing to region switch mods like the Genesis, Saturn, Gamecube; 50/60Hz mods, etc...

And... what about the 8PDT switch you need for the PCE/TG-16 mod?  That basically swaps 8 positions, so think of it as having 8 SPDT swiches (or 4 DPDT switches) controlled by a single switch.  8PDT switches are pretty rare, and you'll most likely need to special order them.  So yes, technically, you CAN do a PCE/TG-16 region mod with 8 individual SPDT swiches, but that'd be a pain in the ass, huh? 

[Michael Helgeson]

Not my soldering guide Got to be careful about that around here,you might get sued by misspelled animal characters otherwise   came across it while looking around guru3d.com. They had posted a link for it,but I'm not sure if the guy who did it was from their site or not,I didn't check.

The DPDT is what you'd use for the Saturn USA/Japan region mod. Radioshack usually carries nice black based ones with a red switch. These look very nice on the USA Saturn. If your modding a Japanese deck you could just paint the black plastic on the switch with model paint to a matching color of the Saturns shell. Easy stuff.

[termis]

I actually just got an idea for the Saturn switch mod (US-JP), and I *may* be able to do that mod with only 3 wires and an SPDT switch - by cheating just a bit.

How?  Well, as you said, the known mod right now requires a DPDT switch (and thus 6 wires) because it needs to switch 2 jumper positions - JP6/7 and JP10/11 to switch between the 2 countries.

        JP6/7     JP8/9     JP10/11   JP12/13
----------------------------------------------
US      JP6       JP9       JP10      JP13
Japan   JP7       JP9       JP11      JP13


However, you only need to switch ONE jumper position - JP8/9 - to switch between US and Korean regions. (if the jumper table shown here is correct.)  This would only require a simple SPDT switch, with only 3 soldering points on the board!

        JP6/7     JP8/9     JP10/11   JP12/13
----------------------------------------------
US      JP6       JP9       JP10      JP13
Korea   JP6       JP8       JP10      JP13

Now you ask, why the hell would anyone want to switch to the Korean region?  Because after researching a bit, Japanese and Korean systems are supposedly able to play 100% of each other's games.  I actually own 2 Korean Saturn games myself (Virtual On and El Hazard), and they work perfectly fine when my Saturn is in JP mode.

I'm actually gonna try this out on one of my spare saturns in the next few days to see if it works...   If it does, this really should make the Saturn one of the easiest systems to mod.

[Michael Helgeson]

Yea try it but be careful. Some games didn't have region lock out. I found  a few games to play in all regions,must have just been a fluke of all things. I think one of the titles I had that ran in all regions was USA release Golden Axe the Duel. I could be wrong,but I was thinking it was one of them. Nights may be another. Its been forever since I had either title and ran them. But yea your idea sounds like a good try,I'd go for it and see what happens.

[termis]

Just did the mod - and interesting results...

First, I saw that the main menu saw displayed the familiar region 4 (US) on one side of the switch, and region 6 on the other - I guess this is Korea.

So when in US mode, everything booted and played fine as it was supposed to.

Turned off the machine, flicked the region switch and put in a Japanese game... Saturn went to the main menu displaying "game not suitable for this region" message.  Ugh, so maybe there IS a region check between Korean and Japanese games.

So I threw in a Korean Saturn game and... it didn't play that either!  (and remember, they played fine when my other Saturn was in Japanese mode).

So after this experiment, I can come to a few possible conclusions - from least to most likely, in my opinion.

1.  I goofed on the mod somewhere.
2.  Region 6 really isn't the Korean region.  It's some other random place.
3.  Although Sega originally included a different regional setting for the Korean market, this was actually never used, and Korean games were actually released with the region 1 (Japanese) stamp. 

#1 isn't likely, because had I goofed, the US side of the switch probably wouldn't have worked perfectly, and it also wouldn't have displayed a different region (region 6) in the main menu for the Korean side of the switch.  It most likely wouldn't even have booted normally had I really messed up somewhere on the mod itself.

Maybe #2, but I can't verify unless someone with a Korean Samsung Saturn can verify that their Saturn displays region 6 in the main menu of the screen (or checked the jumper settings).  I don't even know if Samsung Saturns display this info on the main menu, considering a Japanese Saturn unit I have do not display it.

Most likely #3 - this would explain the supposed 100% interchangeability of games between Korean and Japanese regions, and why my Korean saturn games boot up on region 1 (Japanese), and NOT region 6.

So in the end, in didn't work as I planned, but I learned something out of it.  Hopefully it was of interest to some people out there...

[guyjin]

I actually just got an idea for the Saturn switch mod...

Just did the mod - and interesting results...

less than 24 hours. yikes.

[termis]

Yup.  The mod certainly doesn't take long