V-Saturn follow up

Hi gamers,

After talking to many of the skilled people over at ASSEMbler, they have come to the conclusion that my Saturn is indeed modified. The Saturn's modchip doesn't allow multiple regions to be played, but does allow backups to be played from the region which is why Dead or Alive would boot without the cart.

When the cart was inserted the Saturn it would boot up Action Replay, and then allow me to boot games from any region that were backups. I haven't opened up the V-Saturn yet I have a really bad screw driver set they're not long enough to fit into the Saturns screws.

Here is what some other members had to say about the issue:

"Notice the keyword there, Game Disc, if it weren't chipped yours wouldn't recognize it as a game disc at all, just an audio CD." - Xeauron

"Some of the Chinese "Action Replay" carts have a chip to enable the boot of CDR discs like the magic card does" - Yakumo

Also a great write up about the Saturn Security - By MottZilla

"The Saturn Modchip just injects the security data that normally is read off real discs. Region coding is not modified in any way. The result is that the Saturn Modchip is not useful for playing imports at all. All it does is bypass copy protection. The Action Replay and MANY other cartridges can bypass the region lockout. 


As others have stated, your V-Saturn can only boot NTSC-J coded games, unless you use the Action Replay as a loader. This is because the BIOS of the V-Saturn checks the region before loading where as the Action Replay doesn't care. And actually the Memory Card Plus (I think InterAct made it) can also allow booting other region discs.


But your Saturn is definitely modded if it can play a disc without the Security Ring on it like a CD-R disc.


Playstation is quite different. Playstation's copy protection and regional lockout is actually the same mechanism. Codes are on each licensed disc that read either SCEI (Japan and maybe parts of Asia), SCEA (North America), or SCEE (Europe and other PAL terrorities maybe).


What happens when a disc is inserted is the disc is scanned for these codes. Each disc has this code on it 3 times. Likely for covering the off chance of a read error. If the consoles region is SCEA and it reads the disc and returns no SCEA codes, it knows the disc is not licensed (or not licensed for your region)/cd-r and will not allow the CPU to read from the disc at all. So to play imports on Playstation you must defeat both Copy Protection and Regional Lockout since they are the same thing.


So actually Sega Saturn was far more import friendly since with a cheap switch or a fairly cheap cartridge you could play all those great imported titles. Where as with Playstation you had to solder a modchip or use a swap trick which offer less than optimal results in many cases.




There is a region free Saturn BIOS available now that also had some of the copy protection removed but it still won't boot CD-Rs. If a hidden command is discovered it may be possible for a BIOS or just a program booted from the cartridge slot to unlock the drive's security similar to the System Disc which would be interesting. I'm not sure if anyone has looked at the System Disc program to determine if the CPU program is sending an unlock command or if the CD subsystem cpu is reading some code on the disc and unlocking itself." - MottZilla



So there you have it, my V-Saturn was modified all this time.. I would never of thought..

Thanks to everyone at the ASSEMbler forums for their input, it cleared up a lot :)

This is HeXiGON signing out.