Yet Another Saturn Disc Drive Problem - Works, But Not Well

[scarper]

Hello all, I have a Model 2 Japanese Saturn with the chip mod I bought from the Racketboy store a few years ago.

The disc drive works... sort of. Games boot, both official and burnt. They seem to play alright for a little while. But occasionally, the game will crash back to the BIOS menu when trying to load something new. In Virtua Fighter 1, this happens after advancing past the 4th stage in arcade mode. In Daytona USA, this happens after finishing a race, sometimes. The music in games will occasionally cut in and out, and while this happens, I can hear the disc drive trying to catch up with itself.

Opened up, checked things out for a bit. Nothing collapsed. Ribbon cables are sitting properly. Mod connections still look alright, and nothing has melted. Tried the "raise it up" trick and that kind of made things better but didn't solve the issue. I'm still getting these symptoms.

Is my disc drive deteriorating? Is this a mod chip problem? I may need to re-do the power supply solder connection since it looks kinda sloppy (it was my first time, modded this YEARS ago.)

Any help with possibly finding the issue would be greatly appreciated. The Saturn is my favorite video game console of all time, so here's hoping I don't need to make any expensive/difficult repairs.

Here are some pictures of the inards:

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15631286_10212279965741142_1676620998_o.jpg (80.74 KiB) Viewed 2384 times

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15658074_10212279933060325_277873962_o.jpg (55.96 KiB) Viewed 2384 times

[Ziggy]

I would uninstall the mod chip and then retest the system. See if the issues still persist. If the issues go away, then you'll know the problem was with the mod chip (either the installation or the mod chip itself).

[zyrobs]

Try connecting the modchip power to the positive leg of the C210 cap on the disc drive (it's the one immediately in the front of the unit). That way it'll get properly filtered power, which makes a lot of difference - I've seen modchips that only worked that way.