The ultra 64

[thewise1]

I'm starting an n64 project (not a portable) for a home console. I'm going to mod an n64 with leds, paint, maybe a fan, rca jacks and s-video.

Now the real task is what I'm going to mod on the system itself. I'm going to remove the tabs so it can play japanese games, and I'm going to put a 6 pole switch somewhere on it to switch between pal games and US games.

Now I found this diagram http://i36.photobucket.com/albums/e36/D ... 809366.gif

And I want to know what do I do with the rest of the pins, do I just connect those to the other pif and to the board? Or can I just use one switch and switch between the boards.

Also, how do I connect to my ntsc tv without loosing color using pal? Since there's no RGB on pal will s-video work?

[timmeh87]

It looks like the PIF on the bottom is actually just empty pads where the PIF used to be before it was removed. Then the two real PIFs are hanging out up there on a daughterboard or something.

To me it looks like you would need to have all the unlabeled pins connected together (ie connect all three pin 1 together, connect all three pin 3 together.. etc).

In order to accomplish this, maybe you could even stack the chips to save on wire and space. Maybe you could even leave the original one right on the board, and then stack the new one in-situ.

[thewise1]

I think what I'm going to do is switch between ground between each chip, which should work. And all other pins will be soldered back to the corresponding pad.

[radorn]

the mod in that diagram is old and admitted by it's author to be incomplete and it's also known to give problems.
the idea is, basically, that you need to put switches on more pins than in that mod to completelly isolate one chip from the other.
in that mod there's still some interference between the two.

There was some discussion about this at gamesx/nfggames, but I don't know the details nor I remember if they managed to define a new set of pins to be switched.

You could look at the PIF pinout in this page http://www.crazynation.org/N64/n64_cart_info.htm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; and try to make it yourself.
Perhaps the solution would be to put a massive ammount of switches for everything save for ground xD. In the aforementioned discussion they mentioned interference in the controllers, so switching all controller lines seems important. Unfortunatelly that's all the help I can give you.

If you perfect this mod, please, post the results.

[thewise1]

Thanks for the link, I'm going to try the ground switching first. As long as it the pif isn't getting powered theoretically it should just look like it's not there.