Sega Saturn Troubleshooting

wallydawg · Post by **wallydawg** » Fri Jun 16, 2006 9:40 pm

I assume this is where I should put this thread on account of the 32-bit gaming era.

Anywho, I just bought a Sega Saturn (Model 1) off of ebay. It seemed to work fine the first time I tried it, other than having to set the Language and Time everytime I shut it off (I guess the internal battery is dead). After playing Road Rash for a bit, I decided to try the swap disk "mod" I can play imports. This is where things go wrong.

After opening up the case, I noticed how dusty it was inside so I decided to clean out some of the dust. My sister has a shop vac that has a "blow" feature so we used that to clean it up a bit. After taping down the lid sensor switch, I fire up a Road Rash again and now it doesn't seem to want to work. The system still turns on and the disk drive still spins, so the game is trying to work but it doesn't seem to want to boot up all the way. Usually three things happen when it's loading:

1. The access light blinks nonstop while the disk trys to load, after a minute or so it gives up.

2. The access light blinks a couple of times, the disk loads as a music cd.

3. The access light blinks a couple of times, the game almost loads but it gives me either a "Drive Empty" or "Disk unsuitable for this system" error.

Since opening up the system I've gotten it to work once, so I don't think it's fried or anything like that; I'm just hoping that something is out of alignment. I took the tape back off as well to try it but same results.

XPCportables · Post by **XPCportables** » Fri Jun 16, 2006 10:28 pm

you say you blew some dust out? well why don't you get some isopropyl rubbing alcohol and a Q-tip and clean the lens, you might have caked up a nice invisible layer of dust on the lens, that is just enough to give you read errors.

wallydawg · Post by **wallydawg** » Fri Jun 16, 2006 10:57 pm

I knew I forgot to mention something else I tried heh. Yeah I did that too. I tried it again just now also (after keeping it off for a good three hours) and PGA Tour 97 booted up without a problem. With the tape still on the lid sensor, the drive seems to be spinning awfully fast. Maybe that could be a problem? I tried my Bootleg Sampler directly afterwards and it gave me the same 3 error messages. Tried PGA Tour 97 directly afterwards and that warrented the same error results.

vskid · Post by **vskid** » Sat Jun 17, 2006 7:03 am

XPCportables wrote:you say you blew some dust out? well why don't you get some isopropyl rubbing alcohol and a Q-tip and clean the lens, you might have caked up a nice invisible layer of dust on the lens, that is just enough to give you read errors.

I left a cd upsidedown for a few months, it had a nice layer of dust and it played just fine.