I bought an official saturn memory cartridge (Japanese version) and went to use it on my US v1 console. I was able to get it to be recognized in the system bios, but the options to transfer game saves or manage game saves are greyed out and only the option to clear the card is available. I went to select this option, and then the bios tries to clear the memory card but fails and says "not cleared". This has happened multiple times as I tried to re-seat the cartridge in the slot to get a better connection. I didn't really find any troubleshooting guides or fixes for this, aside that back in the day sega suggested you return a card that does this to the vendor you bought it from/sega. So is there any fix to this? It doesn't seem like it would be an incompatibility between a JPN mem card and a US console... I'm not sure sega would give me a replacement cartridge in 2016
Not sure if I'm up to disassembling my saturn console tonight, but here are shots of the memory card. http://imgur.com/a/Xu6Q7
Nothing jumps out at me, contacts aren't too dirty. do other cart items work in the saturn? If not check the traces around the cart port.
Good news everyone, I cleaned the cartridge, and although it didn't start working instantly, I have gotten it to work through repeated tries. There were a bunch of saves on the used cartridge that I was able to view and remove so the memory wasn't somehow corrupted and unusable. Back when only the clear option was available, it displayed no saves on the card.
