Anybody Got An Old Super Nintendo?

(And by old, I mean even by Super Nintendo standards.)  Additionally, this entry gets rather geekish and may be of limited interest to most people.  You have been warned.

See, it works like this: I recently acquired a copy of Terranigma (aka Illusion of Gaia 2, aka Soul Blazer 3), the English version of which is (at least in North America) one of the holy grails of Super Nintendo games.  The reason for this being that Enix, who published the game, didn't have a North American division at the time — so the English-language version was never released outside of Australia and the UK.

Now, something most people might not realise is that the only major thing keeping SNES (and NES, and also likely N64) games from playing in regions they weren't sold in are a pair of chips known as lockout chips.  One exists in each game cartridge, and one exists on the console's motherboard.  If the motherboard chip doesn't get the proper input from the cartridge chip, the game doesn't run.  This is also why 3rd-party and home-brew games don't work in the consoles.  (Oddly enough, North American and Japanese games use the same lockout chips; the only thing stopping their use on the other console is a modification of the cartridge slot to accept a slightly different shaped case.)

The thing is, if the lockout chip gets temporarily disabled, the game will start up.  For NES carts other than those produced by Tengen (who built their own lockout chip), this meant sending a negative voltage spike to the chip — something that didn't work with later consoles after Nintendo redesigned them to compensate for this. However, if the pin that lets the chip know whether it's the master (console) or slave (cartridge) gets disconnected/grounded, the chip ends up in slave mode — at which point, according to Nintendo, "an unstable state takes place and no operations are performed at all."  Operations, in this case, referring to the console being reset by its chip, or the cartridge ROM being disabled by its chip.

So, de-solder pin 4 (master/slave) from the chip labeled UC8 on the PCB and I'm good to go, right?  Well maybe.

Universal adapters became popular during the SNES's lifetime, especially in Europe where some games never got released.  Generally they worked by making two cartridge slots available; into one went the game you wished to play, into the other went a game from the correct region.  The console's chip talked to the second cartridge's chip, thereby fooling it into thinking that the game you actually were playing was from the correct region.  You can make a guess as to how pleased Nintendo was over this.

Nintendo's solution to this, added to some late-life-cycle games, was to have the game check with the video chip to see what speed it was outputting at (50Hz for PAL, 60Hz for NTSC.)  If this didn't match what was expected when the cartridge's ROM was loaded, you got this:

There's a solution for that too; sending a +5V or 0V charge to a pin on each of the SNES's two PPUs (Picture Processing Units) changes whether they output at 50Hz or 60Hz.  There's one problem though: late revisions (from at least 1995 onwards) of the SNES motherboard integrated several chips, including the PPUs, into a single chip, for which there is no known way to change the video speed.  Anyone care to guess what revision my motherboard is?

So it's off to the flea-market I go on Sunday.  My goal? To find the oldest (and therefore likely grimiest) looking SNES there (after all, I have a decent case I can place the board in), and hope I get one with the double graphics chips.  This is turning into a rather large endeavour for a game that I could easily emulate if I wasn't so big into physical objects.