can saturn play copied games without modchip?

It's either mod or swap. If no mod, then swap (which covers swapping with authentic boot discs given to developers that a certain few claim to have).
 
Originally posted by Zeplan@Jan. 04 2003, 4:05 am

i was wondering if saturn could play games you burn to cd's without using a mod chip of some kind

If the Saturn could play burnt games without a mod board, why the hell would they even make them? It's not like it defeats reigonal protection. You need to mod the jumpers on your motherboard or get acart for that.
 
Actually, I think there may be a third way. Today, the Saturn I won in an auction came in. The guy who sold it to me said it worked with backups, but he said he didn't know if it was modded or not. So I figured it was since he didn't use the swaptrick to play his backups.

Well, I unpacked it, hooked it up and tried an original game which worked fine. Next, I tried one of the backups that came with it, but it didn't work. There was a cartridge that came with it though, called an ST-Key or something which is meant to play other region games. I inserted it in the cartridge slot and tried running the backup again, and it worked!

The Saturn booted up normally, but after seeing the screen say ST-Key v 1, it then went to the Saturn menu screen. Then, I could just press start and the game would boot. I tried all of the 20 backups that came with the Saturn and several that I've burned this afternoon, and all worked. To test it more, I removed the ST-Key and tried runing several backups, but none would work.

Although I'm new to running backups on Saturn (even though I used to own a Saturn before and I only played originals), maybe I've overlooked something here. It seems to me very much likely that this ST-Key lets me run backups without a mod.
 
Open the saturn up and check to see if there is a mod chip in it. A backup will also fail to load if the region of the disc and system are different.

It could be very likely that all the backups you got are from different regions and will not boot without the st key mod chip or not.
 
That's really interesting. I thought the ST-Key was like the Super Strong Card and just helped make swapping easier. I may have to look into getting an ST-Key if anyone else can confirm this.
 
hmm... Interesting. I have an ST-KEY and another US Saturn that I got that I was about to mod and sell. I'll do some testing and get back to this post. I thought that the ST-KEY was only used in order to illiminate Region-checks.
 
Originally posted by Edge-`@Jan. 04 2003, 2:36 pm

hmm... Interesting. I have an ST-KEY and another US Saturn that I got that I was about to mod and sell. I'll do some testing and get back to this post. I thought that the ST-KEY was only used in order to illiminate Region-checks.

I thought so too actually, it also says that on the cartridge itself. I have a US NTSC Saturn, so I'm gonna try loading backups of which I'm sure they are US NTSC without the ST-Key. I'll post the outcome here tomorrow.
 
Well it seems Gameboy900 was right, I tried to play US backups without the ST-Key and they worked. The ones I tested the first time must all have been PAL or Japanese. Too bad, it would've been nice for people who don't want to mod their Saturn for some reason, but it's good news for me, because now I can get an Action Replay 4-in-1 instead
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Yeah, I knew it could play backups because the guy who sold it told me that, but when the backups I tried didn't work without that ST-Key I figured it wasn't modded. The whole region thing never crossed my mind because I'm used to my Dreamcast, that plays all backups, no matter what region.
 
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The region checking is one of the oldest "protection" scheme in consoles... (Cart based consoles, and SEGA CD is one of those...)

Other kind of protections only came out in 32-bit era...

People sometimes forget the good 'ol country code protection
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What really seems to mess new people up is the fact that the region protection and backup protection on the saturn are two completely different and seperate functions. Neither affects the other in anyway. But most people are familiar with PSX mods where a single mod chip does it all and this tends to mess them up alot.

Sega made the protections in the saturn very annoying to be sure. Much more then sony ever did with the psx.
 
i remember reading in game informer, that the pro action replay cartridge allowed you to play backups on the saturn, or was it imports.... hmmmm
 
I'm constantly amazed by the number of people who believe an AR cart will let them play CDRs.
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Originally posted by mal@Jan. 07 2003, 7:44 am

I'm constantly amazed by the number of people who believe an AR cart will let them play CDRs.
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It's not that redicilous, after all the Dreamcast plays cdr's without any kind of modification and that even uses other media for it's games than cd-roms.

But I did think it was strange to begin with because I had never read anything about it before and I did say it seemed to me like the cartridge worked that way. Which is why I posted here, to know for sure what was the case with it :
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