Part two moves onto testing the SuperCIC switchless modchip, and what better to test with than John Madden Football and some Urban Strike! I’ve also got Micro Machines and Lemmings ready to go. Look at those pixels fly!

With everything hooked up upstairs, I powered on the Super Nintendo and was immediately greeted by a black screen. Not exactly the result I was after, but at least the modchip’s indicator LED was changing colour when I held down the reset button.

We’ve got red, orange and green modes to play with, although I hadn’t exactly committed the instructions to memory at this point. Perhaps reading the documentation first would have been a good idea. Never mind, that’s what experimentation is for!

Eventually Urban Strike appeared while the indicator was green. Success! Switching between the modes seemed to affect the video timing, with the amount of letterboxing changing noticeably. I suspected that green was giving me the usual PAL 50 Hz output, while another mode was switching to 60 Hz. The orange setting wasn’t cooperating particularly well during these first tests.

After a bit more fiddling, and the occasional reset, the system was switching between the different video modes. I’d had a quick look at the documentation by then, but I was still working out exactly how the settings behaved.

Then came the really entertaining part. John Madden Football started running at 60 Hz, and suddenly the music and sound effects were noticeably faster. Good grief, Madden sounds like he’s about to explode! Watching the game speed up and then slow down again as the mode changed was rather amusing.

The modchip was certainly doing something useful, although I still had a little tidying up to do. The indicator LED needed attention, the wiring could be neater, and there was even some Blu Tack holding things in place temporarily. Very professional!

I’d followed the Wolfsoft information for the installation, and there’s more testing to come once everything is a little better organised.

For now, it’s alive, it’s changing video modes, and John Madden is having the time of his life!