I saw retrogamecave.com is going to be selling a new 4 wire modchip. They said on their facebook page that you do not have to turn the console off to switch regions. If this is true, it does pretty much the same thing as the full bios replacement (except for changing the startup animation) with a lot easier install. https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.784068141606336.1073741844.190062451006911&type=1 quote by them "Our DC mod chip makes any Dreamcast Region free, plays multi disc games and there's no need to reboot or turn off the console when changing regions of games. Also... Its easy to install if you know how to use a solder iron."
Well, I don't know about the old chip, but what's the use of not turning it off? Unless it also changes refresh rates? Beside, conceptually it's very easy to make it region-free without selecting a region, only patch a few bytes in the ip.bin, three characters and three "lines" of text, so I don't know why the original would've required reboots.
Maybe it's not new then. I was going by what I had read about it previously like this from mmmonkey on the bios replacement page: Why perform this mod? Well you’ll end up with a Dreamcast which is different to most others, plus it will be truly region free, the current 4 wire modchips need you to switch the console off and back on again if swapping between different region discs. This one skips ALL region checking.
The original 4 wire chips did require a reset but a new revision fixed that. I have one of the much older 6 wire chips that need a reboot as well. You can get the four wire chips from hk gokdenshop for $11 shipped. Then a replaceable 2032 caddy and rechargeable battery from eBay for $9 shipped. I do these mods for $30 installed all the time
Cool. Thanks for the info. I figured since the mmmonkey post was from less than 2 years ago, it would have had up to date information.
Well he wasn't incorrect as some folks still sell of stock. I know that the new revision of the chips are not that old but as was stated before if you are a European user you will have to turn it off to switch between 50 and 60 Hertz. when does not need to do this with the dev bios.
Well thanks again. The way retrogamecave was talking about it, it seemed like their chip was some kind of big deal. I am assuming now it's the same thing you can get for $11 from china. I'm sure they are charging a large premium for theirs and that's why they won't say how much it's going to cost yet. They did package the chip up to look nice though (even though you won't ever see it).
My region free BIOS has 2 less wires and you don't have to worry about patching your images for any reason!
How small are the solder points? Also, does it affect MIL-ROM booting at all? I don't want to lose the ability to remote-debug.
The flash is a 44 pin SOP - so the pin pitch is 1.27mm (well, really 0.050") - not at all difficult to solder. The only thing I would recommend is that you use a temperature controlled soldering iron - the PCBs that Sega used seem quite sensitive to overheating and the tracks lift easily. The region free BIOS will boot MIL-CD. Note that this is the case even if you had a VA2.1 unit that couldn't boot them before.
For you and me maybe but for the persons following this advice, it'll be really hard if you are not used to soldering. As for temperature, I find 600-650 F (325-375 C) works well. You shouldn't solder the same spot for several seconds in any case though.
Depends on the iron and solder - I'm using a Hakko 888D, which has pretty good heat recovery, so I tend to use about 340c for RoHS solder and 300-310 for SnPb. Best thing to do is play with the iron you have and some scrap PCBs and find the lowest point where the solder will flow without excessive dwell time. This is the other reason that a good iron helps - it will minimize the amount of time that you have to keep the iron on the board. Yeah, you are probably right - I've got so used to tiny packages that a SOP looks huge to me now...
