any help around? issue with my sega saturn

[mrshadow]

hi everyone, just recieved my retroTINK x2 SCART and its completely working fine-i love it! it made my duke nukem 3d look glorious,so pleased ive bought this.

however, a 'new' issue has popped up (it was always there, i just noticed it now ive worked out not all the blame is on the useless converter i was using), and im wondering if something in my saturn coud be dying,as most of the time-even before or today with the retroTINK itll all light up as normal,and the sega saturn screen wont come up, itll stay black,the discs will spin as normal though,its ran the odd time before, like panzer dragoon saga works fine.

its a japanese NTSC saturn that has been region modded with the reset switch and it has the phantom chip installed.

when i setup the retroTINK x2 SCART, i played duke nukem 3d which looked amazing, my support staff kept chatting for a while,distracting me so it ran the demo of it for a bit,and there was no sign of it not working.

i get to choosing the difficulty level, chose it, and it acted as if it was loading but it didnt move any further.

i tried over thirty games-many of them official and many backups that i know all work and i just got the instant black screen.

pressing the reset button to change the region doesnt change the behavior.

i wondered if it coud be the HDMI cable-which is really old and quite suspect i think, or the RGB SCART cable which was bought off ebay-its an NTSC RGB SCART,i checked my ebay purchase history to make sure.

i was supposed to buy a packapunch pro SCART this week but i didnt have the spare cash.

im going to my parents house for the day tomorrow so ill be bringing my saturn to try it out with a tv and different HDMI cable, i havent got a spare one in the house.

much thanks in advance,cheers.

[buckoa51]

That's sounds more like a fault with the hardware, not your upscaler or cables or anything. If it's sometimes failing to load levels that can't be the HDMI or SCART cables fault.

Do you still get the audio when the screen's black?

[mrshadow]

Jul 15, 2021 18:01:17 GMT buckoa51 said:

That's sounds more like a fault with the hardware, not your upscaler or cables or anything. If it's sometimes failing to load levels that can't be the HDMI or SCART cables fault.

Do you still get the audio when the screen's black?

hi! thankyou so much for answering! i was having a bad anxiety attack and catostrophising last night and thought it was lights out for that saturn.

i have since noticed one more symptom,that happens not all the time-but some of the time...when the sega saturn splash screen boots up, and the animation appears, the audio can go distorted,and sometimes it just hangs and the audio loops over and over.

most of the time though-the black screen 'event' happens without any audio.

ive tried an experiment twice after two black screen events, i left the power to the saturn off for a few hours, and turned it back on,i tried every game expecting to get a black screen at some point but it did the job,a couple of times the audio went distorted at the splash screen but stopped when the sega screen and game booted, however it did crash during panzer dragoon saga after a couple of hours worth of unsaved play-ive learnt my lesson lol.

im wondering,if something in the saturn,such as old capacitors coud be over heating? coud it be dust affecting it like with laptops/PCs?

i know nothing about fixing them but might be able to persuade my dad to have a look at it,id love to do it but my hands shake from severe peripheral neuropathy,i have acidentaly broken capacitors off a raspberry pi board in the past.

cheers!!

[buckoa51]

Recapping the console would be where I would start, Zyrobs knows more but I think he'd agree here.

[zyrobs]

If those crashes are completely random then it most likely needs recapping.
Do you also have an extremely wobbly picture, or is the motherboard type VA6 or later? If either of those is true, then I'm almost completely sure it's the caps.