So I bought a lot of "as is" saturn consoles, and most of them either work or have the typical dead laser. But then I encountered the oddity. US Saturn VA8 It booted to the Language&Date menus and no cursor could be seen, but I could move it around and it would play sounds and I could get through it but if I didn't go through the menus fast enough (10 or 15 seconds) it would crash. If I got through the language&date menus it would go to the "Splash Screen". The typical US screen, but there was no Logo. Just Sega Saturn written on the bottom. It then proceeds to a black flickering screen and seems to crash (or at least lock up). So I opened it up, and found an odd mod chip I've never seen. One slot for the ribbon cable then the chip itself plugs the saturn mobo, it's recieving the 5v from the PSU and has another unlabeled wire running to the drive itself (JVC Drive, maybe something for that option? Again not familiar with this modchip). So I unplug the modchip, try it again and the same issue. Swap the disc drive for a stock JVC drive and again, same issue. Does anybody know anything about an issue like this? I'm about to pop the modchip into a different saturn, and test the drive from it too, but I have never heard of this issue before.
Any bug parts in that thing? Missing graphics are usually an issue with the two CPUs not talking to each other. Broken traces or bugs chewing on stuff are usually the culprits.
That's what had me really interested, I don't notice anything that's obviously wrong with the board. Guess it's a dead board. Hard to complain though, only paid $10/Saturn and it has a working drive.
Sometimes it can be the vias. Those little holes that lead to the other side. With painstaking continuity testing you may be able to make it live again. If you don't have the time, you could always donate it to someone that does.
if you shove a regular drive with no trap board into a VA8 that had a sanyo or later JVC with trap board, it won't work. also those racket boy chips rarely ever worked with sanyo drive or later JVC drives. VA7 and earlier tend to be the cut off for those chips.
Here are pictures of the board for anyone who can spot anything weird. Thanks for the response, but I'm wondering about the board not the drive. Unless I'm mistaken(I might be, I really don't know) the drive won't cause graphical issues such as missing graphics on the splash screen and crashes. It came with a JVC drive installed, so I assume it was the default. Tried a Sanyo for kicks and no dice. Don't have any other 21pin drives. It had no bracket for a trap board, so I even tried my phantom chip and nothing. As far as I know the only graphical issues caused by the drive not being read properly is that the squares on the sides of the menu screen turn into large red blobs.
The thing is this particular board doesn't boot past the splash screen. This bit here is something I've experienced on other saturns. " The board flashes the Saturn Logo icon while booting, the icon disappears as the "SEGA SATURN" logo appears though. It will boot past there into a game and while I don't notice any graphical errors in game, I haven't found a game that will actually go into gameplay (it crashes in the menus always).
Fire up Yabause, disable parts of the rendering until you (hopefully) get same issue you have. This will help track down the issue (VDP1, VDP2, etc). then you can look for lifted legs or trace damage in the area. Edit: Ignore me, you said there ISNT graphic corruption. Its been a long day.
