So I found a guy who was trying to sell of a lot of old accessory stock. Unfortunately, a lot of it was PAL and... for the most part, worthless. Since it was my birthday and we knew eachother from highschool, he gave me a couple of freebies. So, the first was a yellow transluscent PSone, with some kind of small board attached to the top of it. I'm assuming that it's just a replacement shell, but I'm curious about whatever modding job the guy might have done with this. The PS1 came with no cables and I've yet to try and test it. The second was this Flash2Advance/FlashAdvancePro Linker, 64m in size. If I remember correctly, this is a GBA flash cart. Is it worth anything? And then there's... this odd memory card (also in picture two). It reads "120 blocks compressed", has a small button on it, and appears to display a number when powered. Not sure what it could be. Any ideas?
Huh. Never used an old linker like that. My Supercard CF with the slow internal RAM should be around, doesn't like resource intensive games...
Region switch? for the ps1? They do not work like that. It looks like an after market case, with a modchip on a piece of strip board and the chip in a socket. I imagine someone was testing modchip code or wanted to be able to update it without desoldering it all. Memory card is just like 8 cards in 1, you select which block you want and the PS1 sees it as a normal size mem card.
Oh, I had the Saturn on my mind... It couldn't be did the Playstation have 50hz/60hz mods as well? Or was that controlled by the game?
Yeah! An external modchip mod :asd Also that memory card it's pure crap. You will always lose your save
Switch is probably just to manually "disable" the mod-chip post-boot, to avoid games from detecting them (Square-Enix and Capcom titles from 98/99 and out to comes to mind). Later modchips had built in "stealth" firmware/software that made them invisible post-boot. Case is probably a custom case offered by whoever modded/sold it. That's also quite a small GBA flash cart. (I have some 128mb EMS flash linkers here). Depending on the linker/writer you have there, you can use it to read/write certain types of GB/GBC and GBA carts (just check how many steps the switch on the side of it has. If it's just on/off or a 3 step thing). Also, seems to be lacking the power cable (those things usually shipped with either an AC adapter or a USB power cable). Others already covered the memory card; just a multi-block memory card. Those things are usually the best way to lose all your saves for all games at once (as in; they have a horrible habit of dying) ;D
I've noticed that if you remove the modchip with the wires still soldered, my playstation doesn't run game. Anyone experienced such thing ?
Which model PS1 is it and do all the wires goes to the modchip and none go from one point on the board to another? If the wires don't connect any points anymore then it shouldn't impair booting games.
Adding wires to signals, even if they don't go anywhere, is bad. 1) They're antennas that pick up noise. 2) They're capacitors which slow down an output's rise/fall times. 3) Output signals travel down the wire, hit the end and because they aren't terminated they reflect back and distort the instantaneous output, which further destroys the rise/fall times and may even cause false transitions or if the ringing is bad it can electrically stress the circuit.
