Sega Saturn Issue - Won't Boot

Discussion in 'Repair, Restoration, Conservation and Preservation' started by tik, Aug 13, 2017.

  1. tik

    tik Newly Registered

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    Hi there,

    I'm having boot issues with my Japanese Sega Saturn (HST-3210 model). Some history: I purchased the Saturn a while ago off eBay, but found that it produced errors when running any games. The Saturn would boot to the BIOS menu, but running any games afterwards would either lock up the game, or the games wouldn't boot at all.

    Booting the Saturn with an original Daytona USA CD worked until the point where the Daytona title menu was displayed, and then the video froze and an error message was displayed on the screen (see attached pic). The audio for Daytona kept on running in the background, and wasn't affected by the frozen video. The system wouldn't respond to any controller inputs at this point either.

    I put in an Action Replay cart to see if it made any difference as it would be writing cheat values to RAM registers for the Daytona game, but the game still froze (audio was still running and OK as before) and the same memory address error was displayed.

    I installed a Rhea (https://gdemu.wordpress.com/installation/rhea-installation/) that I purchased for this console to check if the CD-ROM drive wasn’t sending enough data or was faulty itself. I ran Daytona off the Rhea, but the same bus error was shown as before. I ran a different image of Daytona off the Rhea, but the same error was displayed.

    I researched the address error and couldn't find any results online, so I had a look through the Sega Saturn Service Manual PDF (from 1995 - see below) and various other Saturn system documents, and determined that the 0x0602AA92 memory address/region was for the "Work RAM - High" (IC3 & IC4 on the mobo).

    Thinking that there might be a dry solder joint somewhere on the two ICs, I reflowed the IC3 and IC4 chips and booted the system, but now the system doesn't even boot to the BIOS menu, nor to any game. Booting the system now just shows a black/blank screen, and my RGB to HDMI converter detects a NTSC signal from the Saturn, but nothing is displayed. I also triple checked the soldering to make sure I haven’t b0rked something up, and it all looks to be OK.

    I would really like to get this console working - is there anything else that I should try/test? I’m thinking that I may need to replace/remove IC3 & IC4. Is this recommended, or should I be looking elsewhere prior to embarking down this path?

    Thanks in advance!

    Saturn technical documents:

    Page 11 - https://segaretro.org/images/4/4e/Sega_Service_Manual_-_Sega_Saturn_(PAL)_-_013-1_-_June_1995.pdf
    https://emu-docs.org/Saturn/sattech.txt
    Page 60 - https://antime.kapsi.fi/sega/files/ST-254-B-110395.pdf
     

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