Using a PC CD-ROM Drive In A Sega Saturn: Possible?

[Kitsunexus]

Hi, I'm the new guy here. ^_^ I've been a fan of ASSEMbler for a long time, but I just recently decided to get off my butt and post something.

I don't know if this is the right board or not, but I think you guys are the only ones who can help me.

Anyway, back like in 2000 or 2001, I came across a webpage that showed you could hook a certain brand/model PC CD-ROM drive to a Saturn, and that this would decrease disc access times, and make the overall loading time slightly shorter.

However, I cannot find the page again, and after reading some more about how the Saturn works, I'm wondering if the page in question was a hoax in the first place.


Can anybody confirm or deny this myth for me, and if it is true, can you point me in the way of some instructions?

I'd be forever grateful. :pray:


Thank you! ^_^


-Kitsunexus

[la-li-lu-le-lo]

I can't positively confirm or deny that claim, but it seems plausible. I know that Saturn CD drives are highly interchangable, as I've transferred one from a US Saturn to a Japanese Saturn once, and I think they are quite similar if not exactly the same as regular PC drives.

[retro]

Errr, no. The Saturn has its own controller, nothing like IDE. It would take a great deal of doing. And, as has been said with ALL consoles, swapping out the drive for a faster one is pointless, as the rest of the hardware probably can't keep up with the faster transfer speeds. Even if you did get it to work, it is doubtful you would see any increase in read times.

Also, I doubt that a PC drive is going to be able to read the protection ring!

[Jamtex]

I'm sure I saw that webpage too, I believe it was a JVC laptop drive that you had to remove from the case and mount to the Saturn (mark 2 I believe) it required two extra wires to be soldered but it could use the standard ribbon connector. As it was a 4x drive it did speed up access quite a bit (but not 4x more like 2.5x to 3x speed), as you say the webpage has gone and I can't find it for love or money now.

[Kitsunexus]

Cool, thank you for the answers! :) Like I said, when I started thinking about it years later, I became skeptical, but lacked the technical know-how to confirm it false. Thank you!

[Alchy]

The Saturn drive apparatus itself is unlikely to be that fundamentally different from a standard CD drive, although there'd certainly be custom firmware in there. Since CD drives fluctuate in response time and read speed, I'd imagine that if you did get a faster drive working in there, games would take advantage of the increased read speed.

[Yakumo]

how about Saturn emulation on a PC? Do the emulators run original Saturn discs in the PC's CD drive? If so then wouldn't they access faster than the Saturn's drive or are the emulators limited to keep at the original Saturn drive speeds? If not and games do loads faster then I see no reason why this wouldn't work on a real Saturn. After all, the emulation would have to mimic the real hardware as far as data went wouldn't it?

Yakumo

[Barc0de]

SSF 8 for example uses the extra CD drive speed (x8 namely or higher) in order to access the disk. I don't have a saturn to compare the driving speed, but I m almost certain that its the same speed as stock saturns. The only reason it reads faster is probably for data accuracy or buffering/preparing the data (i assume)

[port187]

The Saturn drive apparatus itself is unlikely to be that fundamentally different from a standard CD drive, although there'd certainly be custom firmware in there. Since CD drives fluctuate in response time and read speed, I'd imagine that if you did get a faster drive working in there, games would take advantage of the increased read speed.

Can somebody list the drives and speeds? is it bound to specific Sega/Victor/Hitachi CD drives?

[Alchy]

how about Saturn emulation on a PC? Do the emulators run original Saturn discs in the PC's CD drive? If so then wouldn't they access faster than the Saturn's drive or are the emulators limited to keep at the original Saturn drive speeds? If not and games do loads faster then I see no reason why this wouldn't work on a real Saturn. After all, the emulation would have to mimic the real hardware as far as data went wouldn't it?

Yes it would, and that's the problem. In the PC emulator setup, you've got the emulator pretending to be a Saturn drive in software. It's getting the data off the Saturn disc and then mimicking the Saturn drive in software. If you just plug any old CD drive into a Saturn, there's no software there to respond correctly, so you're holding out that the standard drive's firmware responds identically to the Saturn drive's. I think the chances of a vanilla CD-ROM drive responding correctly to all the Saturn security commands are slim.

I'm no expert on these matters, but I'd assume that unless the Saturn's CD-ROM IO system had been designed specifically to be flexible about what drives it accepts (which would be unnecessary hassle, and potentially dangerous for piracy reasons), it'll only work with standard Saturn drives with the correct firmware. My point was that there could potentially be CD-ROM drives from the same period as the Saturn, which house near/identical hardware and could be flashed with a custom firmware that could take advantage of better seek times/read speeds.

That's enough speculation from me, though.

[Barc0de]

Beyond speed-fixing, I think being able to swap the Saturn's drive will be useful in a number of years when most laser diodes from that era die :(

[Serantes]

Beyond speed-fixing, I think being able to swap the Saturn's drive will be useful in a number of years when most laser diodes from that era die :(

my megacd laser diode is still alive, sadly i cant say the same for my ps2 v3 laser diode :(

so think about that !!! :P

[Barc0de]

your PS3 died already ?:S

[Phemt]

Beyond speed-fixing, I think being able to swap the Saturn's drive will be useful in a number of years when most laser diodes from that era die :(

So my saturn lens did:banghead:

It would be awesome if i could change the cd drive and make it work again, but i guess that i'm dreaming... :crying:

[Serantes]

your PS3 died already ?:S

ups ps2 not ps3 :)
i hope my ps3 will not die soo soon :)

[andoba]

Eh, the saturn is just the CDROM mount + a CD chipset made by Hitachi Semiconductor, I doubt that it's very hard to do stuff with it.

[smf]

The Saturn drive apparatus itself is unlikely to be that fundamentally different from a standard CD drive, although there'd certainly be custom firmware in there. Since CD drives fluctuate in response time and read speed, I'd imagine that if you did get a faster drive working in there, games would take advantage of the increased read speed.

The Saturn CD subsystem works on the same principals as any CD drive. It has a laser and a controller. However you can't just wack a PC CDROM drive in it, because there is no IDE/SCSI controller on the Saturn's motherboard.

If it's only the laser thats gone then pulling bits out of a CDROM drive to fix a Saturn CD is possible I suppose, but if you knew how to do it then you wouldn't be asking about it. If you don't know how to do it then it's likely that finding a mint in box & never used Saturn is likely to be an easier & cheaper solution.

IIRC the Saturn uses an SH1 with an undumped internal program for controlling the CD drive. Possibly if you could decap the chip and get it dumped then you could figure out a way to add an IDE controller to the motherboard and rewrite the SH1 code for a different processor and have it talk to that instead. Thats a much bigger job though.

smf

[AntiPasta]

Well, as you might know somebody built a CD-emulator for the Saturn, he probably 'hooked' it between the SH1 and some DSP/ASIC on the CD board. As far as I know he never released the code, just some schematics.

[smf]

Well, as you might know somebody built a CD-emulator for the Saturn, he probably 'hooked' it between the SH1 and some DSP/ASIC on the CD board. As far as I know he never released the code, just some schematics.

SN-Systems did one too, although they interfaced to a Hard drive and not another CD drive. I suspect this one is too.

Everything is doable, you just need time to figure out how. A hard drive based saturn with a load of games selected from a menu might be worth doing for fun. Or a portable unit that emulates CD's off an SDCARD.

Back to the original topic in hand, it is possible that part of the laptop CD drive could be transplanted into a Saturn. But finding one that works and then taking it apart and modifying it without those instructions is going to be very hard.

smf

[AntiPasta]

Of course they did (though they replaced the CD I/F daughterboard), what I'm saying is that some proverbial bedroom hacker figured everything out, built something and posted some schematics on it... which is a whole lot closer to actual implementation than just knowing that SN systems did something similar.