looking at Saturn mobo

[AntiPasta]

I was having a look at my VA0 PAL Saturn motherboard when something came to my attention. There's a bunch of unsoldered places on the board with names like SW2 (next to the battery), CN10 (left of the controller ports), CN11 (left of the PSU connector), CN2XB (under the BIOS). There are also some solder pads on the bottom of the PCB labeled JP21 and JP22. Now my knowledge of abbreviations would lead me to believe those are switches, connectors and jumpers. Does anyone have a clue what these could be for? Did someone bother to trace the connections?

 

[Arakon]

C or CN are usually spots for capacitors, i.e. for filtering.. often PCBs have spots for them, but they aren't all put in place simply cause they aren't needed.

 

[ExCyber]

My guess is that it's a mix of alternate connector placements (e.g. to leave open the possibility of redesigning the case for some markets) and debug/test connectors. CN2XB sounds like it's for an external BIOS ROM...

 

[Tagrineth]

Originally posted by Arakon@Nov 16, 2003 @ 10:53 AM

C or CN are usually spots for capacitors, i.e. for filtering.. often PCBs have spots for them, but they aren't all put in place simply cause they aren't needed.

Yeah, also PCB design is finalised much earlier than one might expect, and DOES NOT CHANGE unless there's a very huge revision of the system, so respins of the chips that need less power can result in a lot of solder points being unused.