The NEW Roms!! This is what DATEL has to say!!
This is an old text file dated 20 April 1996
The new "ROMS" - Datel Speaks
* The Universal adapter
Our ball and chain :) Seriously, we get thousands of queries about this as you might expect. Our sales staff have been instructed to say 'four weeks'. They've been doing this since December :) The truth is that we ARE still working on it, and boy, it's a bitch! Not bad for a 'first' attempt at area lockout...
We are not entirely sure it is going to be possible using a plug in cartridge, but we haven't given up yet.
* The roms and hardware mods being touted on the net
Well, we've got hold of a couple of these to try - one is a replacement for a chip on the board (not the ROM - it is what we call the DSP) and it purports to be an exact copy of the blue playstation version of that chip. It apparently only works with the same machines that the original swap trick works on - i.e. before the rom upgrade. It was on sale at ECTS but apparently Sony have 'come down like a ton of bricks on them'. The rumour is they acquired them by telephoning Sony with the requisite part number and buying x-thousand of them and the stock control at Sony didn't realise what they were. <smile>. It may be the case that they get repossessed. Rumour of police involvement was also rife. Anyway, we are going to try one. It is a fiddly job, requiring the desoldering and resoldering of a surface mount chip.
The second one we have is an extra chip which is a hardwired to various parts of the circuit board. The instructions come in French, so we're waiting to get that translated. This is a classic hardware botch job, but it may well work and we will try that one as well.
As for the Asian suppliers, we have had no response from enquiries.
One thing we are pretty certain of is that the blue Playstation and ordinary Playstation roms are THE SAME. It is not the rom which decides the country code is correct or not, although the code which interprets the response may well be still there. What we suspect it is, is the DSP chip mentioned above. We have tried moving a DSP chip from, for example, a US machine into a Japan machine and the country protection follows the chip - so this is a reasonably good indicator. This is going to make a plug in device hard to do. If the only solution is a hardware mod, we are unlikely to offer that service in the future, as even with a 1 in 20 failure rate, the cost of providing for replacement machines in the event of damage on our part is too high.
So, we keep on working on it....
By the way, Sony have accessed our home pages, especially the info on the adapter, on average once every other day. The joys of access logs ;)
We would not expect there to be any trouble from Sony if we crack it (rumours have gone around that we HAVE done an adapter, but Sony leant on us - these are not true) - what may cause a problem is if our crack also allows the use of pirate/gold disk CDs. We will wait and see.
--
Graeme Nicholson
