The Sega Saturn is home to some of the best games from the early 32/64 bit era. These days they are not easy to find and they can often have trouble reading discs. In this episode of Fix It Friday, we show you how to adjust the Saturn’s laser so that it can read discs again.
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Just looking at some solutions to laser problems on the Sega Saturn and boy have I wasted hours trying to troubleshoot my issue: mostly seems to run great once the game is running, but getting it started is the issue. Much of the time it'll only recognise it as an audio CD, but be able to play the music on the disc no problem. Thought it might be the lid mechanism, occasionally noticed that slapping shut the CD lid seemed to get it to boot the game. Eventually I just took the disc out and looked at the laser, noticed it was kind of parked in the middle – not at the inner ring or the outer end of the laser rails. I literally just pushed the lasers gently (without touching the lens) alllll the way out to the end of the rails. It reads discs every single time now, and there's nothing wrong with the laser. Apparently Saturn discs have to read some text at the very outer edge of the disc to successfully boot, if it can't read the text then it may read some of the inner data (i.e sound tracks) but it won't boot properly. This is in a modchipped Saturn by the way where you'd think it really wouldn't matter, but even with a Phantom modchip, it still needs to go through the motions of "reading" the outer ring text. So yeah – just try gently moving the laser along the rails, and possibly even adding some lithium grease. In my case it just wasn't able to squeeze it's way all the way out to the end of the rails to read the outer ring of the disc. Makes you wonder how many perfectly good lasers have been chucked away.
Thank heaps mate. I adjusted the laser that didn’t work so I took that plastic housing off and now it works perfectly. Should I put the laser back to its original position or will it be fine? Thanks again.
Sega Saturn's are abundant EVERY WHERE! please dont contribute to the hype!
Any way you could help out i recently purchased a sega saturn and after a while of playing say street fighter when game is loading after a few battles the console resets on its own and boots up the game again. Would you happen to know the cause of this. I noticed when i got the console where the power cable connects the screws that hold it were broken but when opening the console i couldnt find any damage other than the plastic were the screws entered nothing crazy
Pinching drive door switch… Aren't you near mains voltage?
Great work and very informative keep it up !!
Another great Fix it Friday video!