Guide Disabling the SNES lockout chip

YveltalGriffin

First Wii U Trimmer
.
Joined
Jun 7, 2016
Messages
292
Likes
1,050
Location
South Florida
Portables
5
ALL COPYRIGHTS GO TO KYO. This guide is being mirrored from the Console Modding Site because kyorune.com is down, and I feel like the guides it has are very valuable. The guides are lifted from the WaybackMachine Internet Archive, and edited for grammar.

Disabling the SNES lockout chip
In this article, I will be teaching you how to disable the Super Nintendo (SNES) lockout chip. Doing this will enable you to play games from other territories. If you do this on an NTSC Console, it will be able to play PAL games, and vice versa. All the example images shown are from a PAL console, but it really doesn't make a difference.

First, you will have to locate the Lockout chip on your SNES. The SNES board actually has 3 revisions:
-The original board
-The 1chip boards, which are smaller
-and the boards of the SNES Mini. I do not own a SNES Mini, so I can't give you a picture of the location of the lockout chip, but it should not be hard to find.

The lockout chip is a small chip with 18 legs, and no matter what region your SNES is from, the text on it should be similar to "F413A" or "F413B". F413Bs was the one I found on my newer SNES, and the F413A was on the older model.

Here's where the lockout chip is on an old PAL SNES:


And here's where it is on a newer PAL SNES:


If you found the chip, the mod is really simple in theory, but might end up being a bit more complicated in practice. All you have to do is raise the fourth leg (marked in red) on the lockout chip, so it doesn't touch ground anymore. You can also just cut it off.
However, if you do this, newer games like Super Mario RPG will not work on your console anymore. The solution to that is installing a switch to the raised leg, that either supplies it with 5V or Ground.

Now, if you decide to raise the leg instead of just cutting it, it might be hard for you to successfully do this. I read that some people raised the pin with a needle while heating the solder connecting it to the board with the soldering iron.

Personally, I found an X-Acto knife works very well:

Just heat leg #4, then raise it with the x-acto knife. Then install the switch, or don't install the switch; that's up to you.
If you are having trouble raising the pin with the x-acto knife, I like to push it to the side with the soldering iron, and then just raise it with the x-acto knife and no soldering iron. This works really well.

If you can't get that to work either, try adding a TINY amount of solder, to get the solder flowing again. But when I say tiny, I mean tiny. If you add too much, you'll just end up making a giant solder bridge.

If you have some old broken electronics, you might want to practice on a chip of those first.

The result should look like this:


If you decide to add a switch, I suggest applying some hot glue to the chip after soldering the wire on the raised leg, as these legs are really tiny and break quite easily. A nice alternative is electrical tape.

Copyrights:
Kyo
 
Top