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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Even player manufacturers realized this back in the age of DVD and made it really easy to ‘hack’ the player, i.e. to get rid of those RCs. My first DVD player has two DIP switches on the motherboard. One of them disables Macrovision and the other one makes the player region free. Those switches were part of the original motherboard design, not a hack installed by yours truly. And the player manufacturer, you may ask? None other than Sony themselves.

Anyhoo, as you might be aware, region codes are back with a vengeance on Blu-ray. There are now three region codes and it’s no surprise that USA and Europe don’t share the same one. It’s taken a while for the geeks to come up with Blu-ray mod chips, but they’ve finally done it — and I received one today. Inside the envelope is a four-page installation manual, some thin wire and a promisingly complex looking circuit board with one large and several smaller chips on it.

I will publish an article about the entire installation process of the chip on this blog with photos and all. Unfortunately, you’ll have to wait a while, simply because my soldering skills are clearly inadequate for the task. A friend promised to lend a (non-shaking) hand, but it will be some time before he comes back from his summer vacation. And that’s why this post is titled ‘prologue’.