obermotz wrote:Hello,
about a year ago I bought a modchip for a PAL Saturn from Racketboy which was installed succesfully (tested it with a couple of "backup" games). I have not had too much time lately to play those fabulous SHMUPs, but a couple of days ago I was in the mood and turned on the Saturn and alas: none of the backups worked. I have one original game (Sega Rally) which has no problems running. I burnt a couple of new CDRs but they seem to be very unreliable - 2 out of 5 times they load fine, the other 3 times - not so fine
Has anyone experienced anything like this? I burnt all my images with Imgburn at 4x speed. Also all the ISOs were patched to PAL (the region of my Saturn). I do not believe that it has any effect on the disc loading, but the on-board battery needs to be replaced as every time I turn on the Saturn it asks for language/date.
Well, a of thoughts:
1) Your choice of CDR can have an effect on this. Cheap-ass CDR does deteriorate, especially if exposed to UV lights. Its not likely the CDR medium, but, if you are using discs you can visually see through, your Saturn may have issues with them.
2) The laser on your Saturn may be dirty. Humidity is also a killer in this respect. Try cleaning it with standard CDR cleaning solutions, or, I believe, gentle rubbing alcohol with lint free cloth is good. Obviously, apply any solution to a rag before getting near the Saturn -- you don't want to drip/spill fluid on the console.
3) Virtually every CD has a manually adjustable potentiometer (POT). Usually these are very small knobbish/screw looking things that are best turned with a mini-driver (such as used for eyeglass repairs). In case you don't know what this does, it basically adjusts the amount of light going out of the laser. The lower the ohm rating, the less light coming out -- the higher, the more light. Yeah, this suggests you may want to screw around with a multimeter to fix it, but perhaps not. A thing to remember, the more light your laser producers, the lower the life expectancy -- but frankly, with these older machines, I wouldn't worry about that too much at this point in the game. If you want to do this without a multimeter, try to find the POT screw - mark its position with a paint pen (mark the edge of the screw and the surrounding area so they form a line -- that way, you have a baseline of where your system was). Next, turn it very, very slightly left or right. Right, generally means higher ohms -- and this is likely your problem, since it seems your system is growing weaker. By slightly, I mean just a few degrees. These can be very sensitiive. Try playing a normal game and a backup. No worky? Try going turning it left instead -- slightly weakening the laser. Its possible, although unlikely, that the laser is too strong for CDR medium. Still no worky? Screw it to the right again, a little further than before. Keep doing this until things work.
Oh yeah, clean the lens before screwing around with the POTs.
