As promised, a yarn about how the mod chip for a Panny BD30 got installed.
The chip comes with a four-page installation manual. Which I’m not going to scan for you, sorry. First page is kind enough to let us know that we can kiss the player’s warranty goodbye. Noted. Then it makes no bones about the difficulty level of the task ahead: “Installing this modification is difficult.”
It all depends. I couldn’t have done it in a million years. Give me a soldering iron and you’d better run off immediately to pick up some bandages and pre-dial the ambulance service. My friend Sami, however, he’s a wizard with a soldering iron. And guess what? There are a couple of microscopically tiny soldering points here that pretty much require the skills of a wizard. How Sami got those two connected, I’ll never know. I bet it’s something to do with black magic. He said he couldn’t have done it without the really thin wire that comes with the chip. At the end there was about 15cm of it left, even though Sami used it rather generously.
Anyhoo! You’ll get some idea of the task by checking out the photo gallery below. It’s loaded with informative captions and whatnot. It took Sami about an hour to take the player to pieces, connect the wires and put the player back together again. Back in the day he modded a few games consoles and said this wasn’t as difficult as some of those were. There were only seven wires and four of them were dead easy. It’s those two tiny ones that pose a challenge. Don’t try to solder them while hung over.
Oh yeah, almost forgot: the mod works great. While the player is on standby, you press “1″ on the remote control to set the player for region A, “2″ for region B and “3″ for region C, then switch on the player. So far I’ve tested 4-5 titles from regions A and B, and have had no problems at all.
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