My PSU kicked the bucket

[speedyink]

Hello, I'm new to the forums, in fact, I'm new to owning a Sega Saturn.

My friend gave me his old Sega Saturn, which worked great the first two times I played it. I bought a new game today, and went to try it out..Nothing.  Not a sound, no LED power light, nothing.

So I busted out the screwdrivers and multimeter.  I can't find any components that look bad on the PSU board at all, except maybe the transformer looks kind of strange on one side, but I'm not sure if that's normal.  The fuse and all the capacitors look fine, but still there's no power coming out of the cable to the main board.

So I guess my question is, where can I get a new Power board?  I tried ebay and only found one, and it's for a Japanese Saturn.  The board looks almost identical, and even says 125V AC near the AC plug, but I thought Japan was 100V, so I dunno.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. I loved the short time I had with it, and I'd love to revive this one before going out and buying a 'new' one.

[cj]

If you can't find a psu replacement(if it is the psu?), and you can handle joining a few wires? There's my basic tutorial here using a pico atx psu as a replacement. It will set you back around 20 bucks.

[speedyink]

Thanks, that's definitely an option.  It must be the PSU, I can't seem to measure any voltage coming out of the connector that goes to the main board.

Did you end up needing the capacitor or resister for the 9V or was it all good?

Also, is the ground pin on the L7809CV connected to one of the pico psu grounds I'm assuming?

[cj]

No resister/capacitor as is the same with the Dreamcast on other sites/forums. It seems to be all good, I'd play on the Saturn for an hour with more cpu demanding 3d games with no issues. Yes the L7809CV is connected to one of the pico psu grounds.

For powering the pico I'm using one of those universal 12v 1A power adapters which gets a little warm like those step-down adapters. All seems to work fine without issue. Although in a perfect world I'd go for a 1.5A to 2A or greater power adapter, or some kind of 12v laptop power adapter. I'm pretty sure those pico psu's can handle up to 16A input(over kill I know).

One other thing and I'm probably being overly cautious because these things are designed for it anyway. I've strapped on a bit of extra aluminum to act as a extra heat-sink to dissipate the heat from the L7809CV regulator. Actually to be specific I've used/taken one of the Saturn psu regulator heat-sinks to be used with the L7809CV regulator.

For some reason I keep forgetting that the Saturn is 20 years old now! I'm pretty sure Sega only had in mind for the Saturn to last maybe 5 to 10 years ??

[speedyink]

Ahh, the 1 Amp is working good, huh?  I have a 1 amp 12V power adapter, but I also found a cheap one on ebay that's 1.5 amps.  If the plug didn't fit I was just gonna snip the ends off and just hard wire it.  Not pretty, but at least I get to play Sega Saturn again! But if 1 Amp works I might try it out with my existing one before buying the ebay one.

[speedyink]

Holy CRAP! I got all the parts in today, spent a bit of time putting things together, and...I HAVE A SATURN AGAIN! This is just awesome, thanks for the suggestion and for writing the tutorial!