Saturn Sega Saturn Region Free Bios Woes

T

Tobyrieper

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Jul 11, 2019
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Howdy,
I have a problem with my Sega Saturn Pal Mk2 and a region free bios i got from BadAd. I'm sure the Bios firmware itself is fine maybe it's just the game. Worldwide Soccer works fine (PAL) then I load up Euro England 96 and that doesn't work and the colours of the language select almost look like they are 8 bit. It then crashes and goes blank. This doesn't happen with the stock bios.

Could it be just the game or my soldering?

I accidently damaged some traces (3) on the underneath of the bios chip when removing the old one even though I was very careful but I made the school boy error of using pointy tweezer''s. Also I broke off Pin 2 and 44 off of the new bios chip. I checked continuity after repairs and mangaged to solder the ground and power to the new chip.
I have no intention of ever playing these games theyre just the only originals I have left.
Hopefully someone can point me in the right direction :)
 
The damage during the mod definitely could be the source of the issue. Id check continuity again...wiggle things to make sure its not a weak connection.

How did you repair the pins you broke off?
 
Yeah I'm gonna go over it again. OK so for pin 2 I just put a blob of solder on the tiny leg then connected it to the cap by pin 13. Pin 44 I did the same and bridged 44 and 43.
I just thought be odd that one game plays perfect the other game doesn't and it wasn't a fluke. Hmm. Thankfully I have a spare mobo that I recapped and repaired if all else fails.
 
This is what I get now... really odd. I'm going to put the stock Bios back in and see how that goes.
 

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That looks like polygon distortion. Did you accidentally bridge something that shouldn’t be bridged on the board?

My guess is you bridged something going into the GPU. Offhand guess as I can’t remember the location of the bios in relation to the gpu.

It’s odd other games aren’t exhibiting this issue but my gut still says something is broken on the GPU side
 
It must be something like that... the motherboard I had spare it turns out it's knackered. So I'm left with two broken Saturn's and have nothing that works . I just spent £60 on the damn thing. Ahh well. If anybody can help me out would be amazing. I'm pretty sure it's reversable as it happened before with my first bios swap attempt. I reverted to the old one and it worked... I should have just let it be.20190711_230518.jpg20190711_222814.jpg
 
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