South Korean Hyundai Super Comboy (SNES) Motherboard Pictures

I have been taking some of my consoles apart to clean them, and I thought I would post some pictures of the Hyundai Super Comboy's motherboard (현대슈퍼컴보이), the Korean-region SNES (which has the Super Famicom plastic shell form factor). I apologize in advance for the picture quality, I only have a smartphone camera.

A couple of interesting things I noticed:

- The circuitry for an RF output is completely absent -- I tried to show this in pictures -- (there is a factory sticker on the rear covering the output where RF out would be; I thought only the "mini" SNES revision lacked an RF output?)

- The RAM chips are Hyundai brand HY62256A (I am not sure if these RAM chips are found on other motherboard versions -- perhaps in an effort to "Koreanize" the console Hyundai electronics insisted on using their own RAM chips for the Korean SNES)

- The Hyundai brand is screen printed on the motherboard (the sticker on the bottom of the console says (in Korean) Made in Japan) -- I'm curious if these boards were made in the same facilities as the Japanese consoles?

- I have also taken apart a Korean Nintendo 64, and that motherboard did not have Hyundai screen printed on it

I just thought I would post these pictures for anyone curious to see them.


Here are the pictures: (I apologize for not removing the aluminum heat sink piece -- There is a transistor attached to it that I was concerned about cracking off/ damaging)

 

Thx for sharing isunshin . Do you know the PPU Version of this console?

 

You can see it on the pictures wilo It's a 1-Chip which makes it even more awesome

 

I suspect the reason that the modulator was left out was that it would have been useless in Korea - the VHF TV band in Korea has a gap between 88 and 174MHz, and that's where the low-numbered VHF channels in Japan are. One of my friends found that out after he bought a Japanese PC engine to Korea, since none of the TVs could display it.

As for the RAM, it's possible - but it's more likely that they just used the Hynix parts because they were cheaper (at least in SK). Those 62256 RAMs were commodity parts and there were a huge number of vendors. I'm not sure about the console, but I have certainly seen Hynix RAM in the game cartridges.

 

Wasn't the Korean SNES Model by anychance the Only one system that was Region Free?

 

No,it uses a super fami/snes motherboard.

 

Technically speaking the SFC and US SNES are region free. The only thing stopping the games from working on either machine are the different cartridge sizes.

 

A snes and sfc and super comboy uses the same motherboard,a pal snes is a different story.

Region free would imply it plays games from any region and you would have to mod a snes to do just that.

 

Why did Nintendo of Europe added the CIC lockout chip for? kinda pointless in my opinion, is it to stop european importers?

 

For the most part, yes. Third party EU releases came out quite a while after NA & JP releases. For example Street Fighter II came out in EU 6 months after it came out in JP.

Another big reason is protecting publishers when a game is published by a particular country in one region, but another company in another.

 

Does it really take THAT long to localise one game for the market?! I mean other than having to translate a few text here & there to fit the european audiences, so yeah your possibly right about that. P.S one thing that's been tempting me for awhile is how did Europe get games like Parodius, Twinbee's Rainbow Bell Adventures & Terrigama?

 

Yeah, I don't know why it takes so long. That's why I used Street Fighter II as an example. The manual was light & mostly pictures. There's very little text in that game, and the text there is simple stuff, not idioms or things that require cultural reference points. Also, the game was sure to sell. It's not like an RPG with walls of text, or some niche game which the publisher would be taking a risk with sales.

Enix closed up shop in the US shortly before Terranigma was released (they opened a new company in the US in 99). It's a shame, since the US got the other Soul Blazer games...

I have no idea why Konami didn't bring those shmups over, though...

 

I've heared it had to do with the whole Americans mentality of "this game looks too weird & dumb looking" or "It's looks too childish for my tastes! i like things that look tough or edgy hardcore" sorta mess they talk and we all know why they refuse to bring it. Even if the gameplay is very good or excellent they still wouldn't care! "pff" Americans smdh! "facepalm" but yet games like Diddy Kong Racing, Super Mario World, and those stupid titles based on a comic or cartoon did deemed "arkward" or "weird"!

 

Hynix didn't exist yet back then. Those were Hyundai SRAMs. lol

 

Kind of an academic distinction, though - it's the same company, and I can remember when Hynix were still sending out datasheets with "Hyundai Electronics" on them.

 

But Hynix is Hyundai plus some other company together, no ?

Kind of like Spansion (AMD + Fujitsu) and Renesas (Hitachi + Mitsubishi) ...

 

No, Hynix was just Hyundai - they did merge with LG Semiconductor, but that was a couple of years before the name change. They are now "SK Hynix", but Sunkyong weren't in the semiconductor business at all. I'm not quite sure of the reason for the name change, to be honest.

 

I don't know why the SNES / SFC had an RF out plug on the motherboard at all. They could have just put the RF modulator on an external unit attached to "A/V Multi-Out". It has NTSC Y+C and sync going out that port, so it has everything needed to do the modulation straightforwardly other than power (a solvable problem). Having the RF modulator be external would have improved reliability and reduced long-term costs.

 

So am I understanding correctly that this unit has ONLY AV output? I wonder if this is late or final revision as I've seen pictures with both 1-2 ch as well as 3-4 ch toggle switches on the back.

 

Think it was a late revision as they simply had a sticker over where the rf use to be.

The motherboard pictured is from 95.