Thursday 5 December 2013

SEGA Saturn discoveries and woes...


This is a V-Saturn that I got a few months back. The seller wasnt sure whether it was modchipped to play backups. So its time to open her up and see what secrets she is hiding...


 And immediately an intercepting circuit can be seen between the motherboard and the cd-drive. This is a typical modification where the chip fools the drive into accepting bootleg/burn copies of games. Nice. However it does not allow the machine to play games outside of the Japanese region (but those are crap anyway...) and from the handy work, the modder decided that the ribbon cable tensile strength is a good enough shielding solution for the modchip. Sloppy at best.
 

Furthermore, I think he/she made a mistake regarding voltage for the modchip as there is residual solder and char marks on the higher amperage 5V power terminal. Bad. And decided to directly solder the wire to the correct power terminal...hope the power supply holds for a while or it will get messy removing it.


This is a power supply from my other Shiro (white) Saturn, the seller shipped it with an identically shaded power cord which plugs into the local 240V supply and said its powered so. However, it did work for a couple of minutes before a pop and smoke pyrotecnics event happened. So I opened her up and sure enough the power supply was for 100V and the capacitor copped the extra voltage. The fuse did not blow strange enough?! So now I am awaiting a replacement power supply to bring her back to full functionality. The Saturn can limp with this power supply, but the images voltage (along side other components) will have power fluctuations since the capacitor has been compromised. The good news is I can interchange the supply with a local 240V model2 Saturn one and bypass the need for a stepdown transformer. Yay!

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