Saturn Backup Burning Problems...going crazy...

[Genesis Knight]

Just got a modchipped Hitachi Saturn in the post a few days back. I'm not new to this, I thought, as I've got a complete backup collection for Dreamcast and I've stuffed a 500GB Xbox with stuff. Anyway, this Saturn is giving me hell.

I'm using...

- Madrom's Region Patcher
- Sega CUE Maker
- Alcohol 120%
- Action Replay Plus Cart (4M/1M Modes)

This is the deal - let's say I have an BIN/CUE image. I should just be able to burn this off in Alcohol and be on my merry way. The image loads fine in SSF, and the region doesn't matter because I have my Action Replay. However, if the image was NTSC-J it will often NOT boot from the Action Replay - it just skips and reads and skips and reads. I have to quit from the cart interface, go to the CD player, and boot from there. NTSC-U images (usually) load fine from the cart.

Then comes the hell part - WAV/ISO images. I understand that the WAVs have to be sampled at 44100, and that you make your CUE last. The images work in SSF, but I think less than half of the copies I burn out work in the Saturn. (And this at the slowest speed my burner supports - 10X!)

Worse yet, the Action Replay Cart randomly screws backups that had been working ten minutes previously. I actually have to take out the cart and boot without it in!

So what's going on? Is the Cart wrong, are my images wrong, is my media wrong? Is my Saturn wrong? And one last question: if a BIN/CUE doesn't work in SSF, I need to get a new image, right?

Help, please!

[MrPopo]

I'm not familiar enough with ISO/WAV, but the BIN/CUE stuff, you might as well region patch the games to NTSC-U. That should probably fix the issue with the AR not loading them.

[Genesis Knight]

Okay, so I started patching my ISOs to the US region and it seems to help a lot.

The other thing is with CUE/ISO/WAV images is that often they sound perfect in SSF but then when I burn them off the CDDA is all static and noise. So I've started mounting those types of images with Daemon Tools, ripping the virtual disk to a BIN/CUE with Alcohol, then burning that image in RAW DAO mode in Alcohol. It seems to work - is this an acknowledged fix?

[executioner]

While I'm no expert maybe it would help to know what media brand you are using. On old consoles it helps, well that's my experience from handling with a 3DO and a Turboduo.

[Mod_Man_Extreme]

Yeah, burn slow (from a minimum of 1x to a maximum speed of 4x) and use good media.