Pal Saturn 60hz mod made simple

Not a clue.
Well you can overclock anything, but it won't necesserally work.

 

Just curious, once you have lifted the pin 79 and connected it to a switch have you then restored the trace on JP1/JP2 that was previously connected to 5V?

 

No i have not. That does actually make a lot of sense. I will try that later

 

And it works!! F..k YEAH! Thank you very much for your help

 

About that overclocking. That crystal is labeled 14.3M and assuming that the Saturn CPU's multiply the input clock signal by 2 that matches the 28.63 MHz (according to wiki) speed of the CPU's.

I overclocked a MegaDrive 1 once by using an oscillator at 12Mhz which worked fine.

What if i try the same on the Saturn using a 15 or 16Mhz oscillator? Assuming i wire it up correctly what could be the worst case scenario? If it fails, there should be a pretty good chance that i can switch back to the old crystal and have a working console again, right?

 

I recently did with my friend (helped with soldering) 60Hz modification according to Panzer Mike tutorial on my Saturn and it works. Now I am finally playing Panzer Dragoon Saga in fullscreen, fullspeed as it was meant to be played. Thanks for your tutorial Panzer Mike.

 

x

 

There's a jumper on the PLL chip. If you toggle it, it works with either 17MHZ or 14MHZ.

The jumper actually changes the Hitachi PLL chip behavior.

And clock for the whole system (exception being the SMPC which has it's own 4mhz clock source and the SCSP which is clocked by the CD-ROM drive @33mhz) comes from that PLL.

 

x

 

PAL-M color carrier is 3.575611mhz and the PAL-M crystal is 14.30244Mhz. It's a PAL-60 encoding which is supposed to be compatible with USA TV tuners and transmission equipment ("M" broadcasting system) so that's why the carrier is of an frequency close to 3.579545Mhz.

NTSC is 3.579545Mhz and the 4x crystal is 14.31818.

The 14.31818 clock is also standard/common on personal computers, because the IBM-PC and most of it's chips were designed on the United States .... :lol:

 

x

 

The frequency difference is minimal even after multiplying. I doubt anyone would notice ... :thumbsup:

The Brazilian SNES and NES consoles used 21.453666Mhz clock crystal and you won't notice any difference from them and their NTSC counterpart. :nod:

 

x

 

If the PLL is set to run with the PAL clock, you get 4mhz from the PLL, not 3.57 mhz.

The color carrier is generated at pin 28 of the Hitachi PLL chip then is sent through an filter circuit composed of a 2,2kohm resistor and a capacitor I believe be of 22pf.

If you change the PLL jumper (JP4/JP5 on VA0.5, JP5 closed for NTSC) the crystal has to be 17MHZ and obviously you get the VDPs to crap out from underclocking if you put a 14MHZ crystal. :shrug:

I am assuming you're into a PAL region. I had to "transform" an PAL Saturn to NTSC for a guy once and it was a nightmare until I found out about the jumper to change the PLL base frequency. :lol:

 

x

 

To get the Hitachi part number I'd have to disassemble my gray Saturn but I'll only do that if I need to open it for some other reason.

Well, the JP4/5 go to pin 7 of the PLL which is also at one of the edges of the chip.

Also there's a JP3 which goes to GND. I aways assumed that JP3 enables the other crystal postition (exists only on VA0/0.5 board) and again I suppose that second crystal is meant to be used as an override for the color carrier signal. :thumbsup:

 

x

 

Only VERY OLD (1st run) gray Saturns will have the PLL bearing the Hitachi part number. Some (earliest possible units) even have the VDP2 in ceramic package ... :shrug:

Why you don't compare a PAL unit with a NTSC unit and check how the PLL is configured. I don't have any PAL units here to check and the modding I mentioned was done in 1996. I don't have any fresh memories of it neither I kept notes.

 

x

 

I have one of the early consoles with the DIP bios, but its not EPROM - its still a maskrom but its just DIP.