First off, I want to thank everyone in this community who have done a great job of keeping this underrated console alive. I also want to thank the people who've offered help on installing modchips.
I just modded my friend's Saturn successfully. Well, atleast that's what I thought at the time of originally posting this. His Saturn is a round button/21 pin, with a 64 pin IC. The chip he gave me was one he got from lik-sang that had been sitting around for the past 3 years. It appears to be identical to the one sold on racketboy's site.
I did the A+B method and put the chip in the reverse way (with the cable being twisted) and it worked.
For 2 hours or so I played all sorts of games, originals and CD-Rs. Everything ran fine. But I noticed something peculiar everytime I shut off the machine - right after the power light would go off, it would briefly come back on and the video on the TV would flash, during that brief second. This led me to do a test of endurance, where I'd keep the console on as long as possible to see if something was wrong.
I popped in a burn of Sonic Jam... After all, the 3D Sphere levels when you combine S&K and Sonic 1 are quite addicting, so I found it to be the ideal game to keep the machine running with. About 2 hours in however, the console just rebooted automatically.
The system still works and the chip still works. Did the machine just get really hot or something since I've been running it on the carpet for 2 hours straight? Or is this relevant to the peculiar thing I described 2 paragraphs ago? Please tell me it's the former
And here are the other questions I had originally posted.
1) What can cause a chip to go bad? Is it just a natural thing, can the A+B deal provoke it, or what? I'm going to mod my other friend's Saturn later on, and I don't want either of these guys to blame me if their machine fails to load games (if infact, it's the chip to blame and not the soldering job)
2) The other guy's Saturn: I don't have it on my hands yet, but from what he tells me it's from September '96 and has round buttons. I read that this is one of the easiest to do models because there is a 32-pin chip inside as opposed to a 64-pin. I am going to get the modchip from racketboy.
Will I have to put the modchip in the reverse way (with the cable being twisted) like I did with the 64-pin Saturn I just modded?
3) Finally, is it true that slower burns are better for the laser? Or is there not much difference between burning at 1x and burning at 40x?
Much thanks for the help.