I'll go buy a Sega Saturn right now if a solderless mod chip exists. Does anyone know if they exist? Because my soldering may be the worst on earth. I don't care how easy people claim that the soldering may be, I just want to get down to brass tax and find out if anyone has any idea if there's a solderless option. If so, point me in the right direction!
They all are. The only connection that isn't just plugging in a ribbon cable is 5v and you can just strip the wire and insert into the hole and let the pin hold it in place
You can do what bad_ad84 says and put the wire into the 5v pin on the MB, yet the other end of the wire needs to be soldered to the modchip 5v point unless the seller pre does it for you. Seriously though, soldering it yourself is piss easy for a novice to do and recommend.
As if that means anything. On most modchips you just need to solder a power cable, and a jumper. Technically it would be possible to make the jumper a switch of sorts, but that would increase costs. But I think it would be possible to make chips that don't require jumpering at all. A power cable would be a must however, as the data ribbon carries no power. Even if the cable is pre-soldered onto the board, you still need to solder the other part, pushing it into the power supply pins is not the best choice and might loosen the contacts of the power supply. You could probably add some kind of clamp to the end of the wire though. But again, that would increase costs, and it's something you can do in 5 minutes even with the worst soldering iron.
Just learn to solder and you will be able to do many repair or mod work. Up until a year ago I knew nothing about soldering but I've started practicing on some cheap Genesis consoles. Since then I managed to repair Genesis power sockets, replace fuses on Sega CDs, install Saturn modchip, install region switches and even converted a PAL Mega Drive to output NTSC by swapping and soldering the oscillator and a few wires. By comparison installing Saturn modchips are much easier; it's just one solder bridge and one wire.
If you are still interested.. The Saturn ModChips are very easy to install.. They have two wires to solder.. If you do not feel comfortable with it, ask one of your friends or take it to a computer shop.. I actually took a console many moons ago to a computer shop, and the guy actually taught me to solder..
Mine only have 1 wire. ^this. They're here to wipe viruses, install new hardware/software and maybe sell you some accessories. Old school repair shops are getting harder to find and are there to make a buck not to teach you new skills for free. At least here in the states, I wouldn't bother teaching someone to solder without a big incentive after already trying to do it once.
Some guides still state that you have to install a timing signal wire, despite the fact that that timing pin directly goes into the ribbon (!!!).
So I've noticed and out of the 8 or so chips I have that didn't work from my previous batch 2-3 do show some signs of life and I did try wiring up the timing signal. Got nothin.
That timing signal is pin 1 on the 21pin ribbon and pin 9 on the 20pin ribbon. What kind of life signs did the chips give?
