What exactly is the region lockout for the Turbo?

[MotoRoaderMike]

I got the "Detana!! TwinBee" HuCARD today, and I held it against an american TG16 card to see if I could find out what the lockout was, and it looked the same height and width as an american card, and it looked to have the same number of connectors, so what's the lockout?

[termis]

Essentially, the 8 contact pins in the middle of the card on the US and the Japanese cards are switched.  So all that a mod or a converter will do is "unswitch" those contacts.  That is, your system wants to read the the pins on the card in 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8 order, the Japanese card is set up in a 8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1 order:

US chips also check to see something else that's only present in US systems, so in addition to the above, Japanese systems also need to ground pin 29 of one of the IC chips on the main board, but since I believe you have a US system, this second issue is a moot point for you.