My Dead Sega Saturn

[adelaide-atari]

hey! dunno if anyone can help me or not.... i got my saturn out of the cupboard after a few years and the bastard won't read discs... it just sits there spinnin' em but never reading them.....

 

any ideas??

 

cheers

[Atari5200]

make sure the discs are not scratched

 

get a cd cleaner kit and clean the laser.

 

All I got as far as ideas, can you get into the system settings?

[iswitt]

make sure the discs are not scratched

 

get a cd cleaner kit and clean the laser.

 

All I got as far as ideas, can you get into the system settings?

 

Clean the laser, the discs, and just generally give the Saturn a good thorough cleaning. I suggest getting a container of canned air (with the little straw thing to aim it just right) and dusting out the system. DO NOT tilt the canned air too much though b/c it can leak a chemical that keeps the air condensed. You have to keep the can relatively upright. Clean out the disc bay, the controller ports, the cartridge port, the body of the system (with a gentle solvent, like 409), and do the general "keep it clean" type stuff.

[Seob]

i have a saturn that only plays discs for 5 minutes or so then i get no picture. When i take the upper shell of and power it up, i can play for hours. So it has to be some kind of overheating problem. Some time i'm going to install a fan into the power supply part.

[liveinabin]

They do seem to suffer from overheating. Mine plays fine for ever until you turn it off, after which you've got to leave it for a few hours before turning it on again, otherwise you get a picture full of lines, a whining noise and no disc access.

 

I did buy another Saturn last week to replace it, but in the midst of swapping the innards over (my old case was in better condition), I must have done something wrong because it not doesn't see the disc drive! Doh!

 

5 minutes of play is a bit excessive though. I can't imagine it even has time to heat up in 5 minutes.

[Seob]

Could be 10, don't know exactly but it was fast. Did you forget to connect something? Did you try swapping the drive from the old one with the new one?

[+-^CrossBow^-]

Ehh..join the club. I have two Saturns. One worked for about a year or so..and then in the middle of my 2004 OVGE show...it up and died during the tournament that it was being used for?! That Saturn still sits around here somewhere dead. It basically just locked up while playing it..and after powering it off and then back on..it just gives a black screen.

 

My other Saturn, is even more of a pain in the butt. Because it plays about 80% of most of the Saturn's titles just fine. But a few games like Daytona CCE, Virtua Racing both cause the damn thing to lock up randomly while playing. For VR it plays about 10 - 30 min and then locks. But for Daytona, it locks up within a min of actually starting a race. It also locks up if you let the demo run.

 

So...in both cases it has to be something to do with 3D stuff. What, I couldn't say but there you have it. The Saturn and DCs are the only Sega systems to give me any problems. I also have 3 DCs and only 1 of them works correctly as well.

[Mark Wolfe]

They do seem to suffer from overheating. Mine plays fine for ever until you turn it off, after which you've got to leave it for a few hours before turning it on again, otherwise you get a picture full of lines, a whining noise and no disc access.

 

I did buy another Saturn last week to replace it, but in the midst of swapping the innards over (my old case was in better condition), I must have done something wrong because it not doesn't see the disc drive! Doh!

 

5 minutes of play is a bit excessive though. I can't imagine it even has time to heat up in 5 minutes.

 

 

It's very easy to get the drive ribbon cable reversed. In fact, there are some saturn drives which have the ribbon the opposite of the way it is in others.

 

I would open it and double check all your connections and make sure the ribbons are in the right way

[shadow460]

My Saturn has problems reading cartridges. It's locked up once or twice while reading save files. IIRC, it's locked up with Virtual On while reading a replay from the InterAct memory card, and it locked up while reading Worldwide Soccer: Victory Goal's save file from the official memory card.

It also locked up while reading NiGHTS's save file from the memory card, and it corrupted the file.

 

I'd say overall it's reliability is great. It's one owner, and I've had it since 1997. My PS1 locks up at random on Colony Wars and Red Alert: Retaliation. My N64, which is also one owner, locks up when KI Gold is booted with a Rumble Pak in place. The N64 has problems managing Pak swaps, too, so I generally don't use a Rumble Pak anymore.

[liveinabin]

It's very easy to get the drive ribbon cable reversed. In fact, there are some saturn drives which have the ribbon the opposite of the way it is in others.

 

I would open it and double check all your connections and make sure the ribbons are in the right way

 

 

I did make a note of which way round it was when taking it apart. It was folded such that it only really fits in comfortably one way anyway. I'm worried that I might have damaged it.

 

Oh, and I did think of swapping the drives around but they both have different fittings, odd considering they're both mark 1 PAL Saturns. The Saturn was really a bit of a hotch potch effort wasn't it?

Edited May 14, 2008 by liveinabin

[Shawn]

I didn't realize the Saturn was still considered a "modern" system. Would have thought that phase of the Saturn's lilfe was over in 1999, you know almost ten years ago . Guess I'm out of the loop.

[DragonmasterDan]

My Saturn has problems reading cartridges. It's locked up once or twice while reading save files. IIRC, it's locked up with Virtual On while reading a replay from the InterAct memory card, and it locked up while reading Worldwide Soccer: Victory Goal's save file from the official memory card.

It also locked up while reading NiGHTS's save file from the memory card, and it corrupted the file.

 

I'd say overall it's reliability is great. It's one owner, and I've had it since 1997. My PS1 locks up at random on Colony Wars and Red Alert: Retaliation. My N64, which is also one owner, locks up when KI Gold is booted with a Rumble Pak in place. The N64 has problems managing Pak swaps, too, so I generally don't use a Rumble Pak anymore.

 

There's a few other threads on this but the Saturn cartridge slot is infamously horrible. They all have problems. I own FIVE Saturns because of that problem. The best thing to do is buy one and leave a memory card in permanently. the Saturn has the worst cartridge slot of any system I've heard of ever.

[Mark Wolfe]

It's very easy to get the drive ribbon cable reversed. In fact, there are some saturn drives which have the ribbon the opposite of the way it is in others.

 

I would open it and double check all your connections and make sure the ribbons are in the right way

 

 

I did make a note of which way round it was when taking it apart. It was folded such that it only really fits in comfortably one way anyway. I'm worried that I might have damaged it.

 

Oh, and I did think of swapping the drives around but they both have different fittings, odd considering they're both mark 1 PAL Saturns. The Saturn was really a bit of a hotch potch effort wasn't it?

 

 

hmm, well, as I said, what I would do is go back and re-check everything and reassemble. I think you can get replacement ribbons and parts from robbwebb:

 

http://www.robwebb.clara.co.uk/shop/saturn/saturnhard.htm

 

I DO see he has a 21 pin replacement ribbon cable for sale right now.

 

and yes, the reason Saturn went through so many revisions from what I can tell and have read was to try to stop modchips.

 

Before I modded mine I was using the old swap timing trick, always worked like a charm. If you have the right drive, anything except 20 pin I think, you can mod the thing with a cheap modchip with only ONE wire that you really don't even have to solder if you do it right.

[Bruce Tomlin]

I can't see what most of those revisions would have had to do with mod chips. All the chips that I was aware of went inline on the CD connector, and they only changed that once. And that was more likely because they had to go with a different drive manufacturer.

 

But having modded at least half a dozen of those things for region switches, I know that they really did make a lot of revisions. Those option jumpers kept moving around. But revisions like that are usually done for cost reduction.