Another dead Saturn (this time a japanese one)

[dialtone]

I received my Japanese Saturn today(the white one, with round buttons), but unfortunatly it isn’t working. Of the 8 (mint) games I’ve bought only two worked,but qith of problems(for instance an extended loading time during saturn boot screen and omission of music during stages, with the cd laser looking for the track and doing a lot of strange noises ; also I tried them a second time, but they no longer worked)


Here my diagnosis:

- The CD is spinning

- For what I can tell, the laser moves.

- When there’s a game inside it, the Saturn gets stuck a long time in the boot screen before giving up and showing the Saturn Menu with the “no disc” sign.

It doesn’t play music cds either (I’ve tried).


Now here are my questions

- Is there something I can do to fix my Saturn?


- In case it needs a new laser, is it possible to substitute this laser for a laser from a PAL Saturn ?


Thanks

[Yart]

- Is there something I can do to fix my Saturn?

Rubbing alcohol and a Q-Tip? Clean the laser maybe. It's worked for me before in a similar case.


- In case it needs a new laser, is it possible to substitute this laser for a laser from a PAL Saturn ?

If it's the same model, I'm pretty sure you can.

[termis]

Try cleaning the as yart said first, then iff that doesn't work,

Remove top cover off your saturn, and turn it around. This is a pic of your laser assembly unit. Make minor adjustments to the orange plastic screw you see in the pic below. (Note that black plastic cover is taken off in this photo -- you don't need to take this cover off like I did)



That should extend the life of your laser some.

And yeah, though I've never done it, you should be able to swap the laser assembly unit (the WHOLE assembly, as seen above) between PAL and JP models. I've done it between JP and US models, and I don't see any reason why PAL machines would be different. The only thing you have to make sure whether the assembly takes 20 pin input ribbons (about 90% of mk1 machines) or 21 pin (all mk2 machines, and small minority of mk1 machines).

[dialtone]

I'll try that later. Meanwhile, I thought I should just show you a picture of the laser.

As you may notice, it looks a bit different from the PAL model. For instance, there's no black plastic coverover the lens, making those wires visible.

Is this normal, or is the usual black cover missing?

[dialtone]

Hi

I cleaned the lens up but that was no good. I'll try de laser calibration thing tomorrow and I'll let you know something then.

Thanks for your help. Meanwhie let me know what do you thing about the laser I found inside my console. Is that normal on japanese models (because the EU and US models I've seen do have the black plastic cover over those copper wires)

[termis]

Yeah, I don't see any copper on my unit either -- and I *think* the laser on my unit is a US model (about 90% sure -- though there's a *small* chance that it could've been transplanted from a Japanese unit).

It could simply be a revision difference, but I'm not sure about that one.

But I can tell you that what you see is almost certainly not due to regional difference -- that's controlled by a few jumpers on your motherboard, and 50/60Hz output is controlled by one of the pins on the video chip. (In essence, one can take any region saturn and turn it into another region saturn without ANY change of parts other than jumper pins)

[Tripredacus]

That is some extremely interesting info. Is there a picture someplace of these jumpers?

[termis]

Jul 8, 2010 23:42:24 GMT Tripredacus said:

That is some extremely interesting info. Is there a picture someplace of these jumpers?

www.gamesx.com/wiki/doku.php?id=imports:sega_saturn

Basically, multi-region saturn mods have switches controlling those jumper settings, but one can choose to hardwire a particular region of a saturn to another region if they wished to do so using the info above.