Unable to Play Saturn Games

Hello. I have an interesting problem with my Saturn that a search through the forums hasn't seemed to produce identical symptoms, so I'm posting them here to hopefully have some idea on what's going wrong.


First, I'd like to state that I have a model MK-80000A Saturn. It has the 64-pin IC. I tried to mod the board previous but failed (I'm not that incredibly handy with a soldering iron). Over the course of several attempts to get the mod working, the white ribbon's connectors were roughed up a bit and there was a bit of smoking near the 64-pin IC in what I think was a short.


Now, after failing to mod my Saturn, I was able to continue using the swap trick to play my Saturn for quite a while. I also fiddled around with the orange screw on the laser unit to be able to use CD-RWs.


Now, quite some time later, I stopped being able to play Saturn games. This goes for originals and burned CDs alike. However, my Saturn is perfectly capable of playing the audio tracks of whatever CD I put in. The weird thing is, the lens head no longer moves to the outer ring at any point to try to read the copy protection ring.


So, all of this has left me to believe one of three things. One, my ribbon became so scuffed up that some of the signals from the main board aren't getting through. Two, the smoke was actually "magic smoke" and there was a delayed reaction before my Saturn stopped functioning. Three, I fiddled too much with the orange screw and basically broke the CD reader in some fashion.


Unless the problem is really simple, I doubt I'll be able to fix it. I'm just curious as to what the problem is. So, thanks for any information you can provide.
 
Hey!


Did you have any luck getting this figured out? I have the exact same problem (except as far as I know my Saturn has not been modded or attempted to). I just bought an old one, and it will play audio CDs fine (as well as the audio tracks from game CDs), but it won't play any of the games.


Help!!!!
 
I have the same exact problem, i have not modded my console, and i have already tinkered with the adjustment screw under the laser. Could it be a faulty motor?
 
Axeslinger666 said:
I have the same exact problem, i have not modded my console, and i have already tinkered with the adjustment screw under the laser. Could it be a faulty motor?

Did you tinker with the adjustment screw before or after it stopped working?
 
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