Tape/wedge the drive lid sensor down, power up with a real game in (you don't need to close the lid as the sensor believes the lid is always shut) and allow it do the initial copy protection check on your real disc.
At this point it stops the disc for just less than second - just enough time to pull the real disc out and swap in a CD-R. It takes a little practice and potentially can damage the drive motor if your timing is frequently poor.
Games this won't work with are those spanning multiple discs where you need to swap discs in game to progress.
Then I killed it trying to mod it. Got a PS1 instead, couldn't figure out the trick anymore.
It was funny that they kept on changing the points where the disc would read info, you had to swap multiple times at different points. They wouldn't stop either, just slow down.
Ugh, don't remind me. My brother fried our n64 and our ps2 trying to mod them into handheld's (with built-in screen).
Maybe you can shave the back of the shimmed wobble edge down, so that it won't stick out as much on the burned CD. This shimmed wobble can be your key for all the burned CDs you have.
Maybe double sided tape can keep the wobble shim attached to your burned CD while still allowing it to be removable for other CDs.
I've never had a Saturn, so I don't know what this wobble edge looks like in person. Am I missing something?
It's similar to the Gamecube using the burst-cutting area to implement DRM - it's impossible to duplicate without a production setup.
The video shows it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOyfZex7B3E#t=2m13s
The protection ring is visible to the naked eye for this reason. I can't find a picture, sorry!
> Why not just cut the wobble edge of a real CD off and attach it to a burned CD?
This would have a very low success rate, as the precision required to accurately cut off the wobbled edge on an original disc (and the target area on a CD-R) would a lot of upfront engineering as well as cost-prohibitive tools. Optical discs require more precise measurements than most people who favor the scrapbooking "cut-n-glue" solution can provide.
This is just as long as we're pretending it's possible. Opitcal discs lose a lot of structural integrity the moment you start breaking/cutting them. The reflective portion where the data resides is on a thin film substrate at the back of the CD. Cutting that without outright destroying the disc or (at least reducing the operating life) would take significant effort, as would precisely healing the new gap from combining two separate materials without destroying the alignment of all those microscopic ones and zeroes.
Not to mention that any adhesives you might apply to combine the two pieces would make that level of accuracy impossible, if not highly improbable. And then you have to hope the whole thing holds up while spinning. Even assuming you could get the two pieces to combine seamlessly, there's always the chance that you've done something that destroys the balance of the disc, which could have a number of unfortunate effects in spinning media. I don't think the Saturn drive spins fast enough for it to sling off and demolish your hardware, but it could cause data inaccuracies at the very least.
I mean a company could attempt to do it for you, but it'd be cheaper and more reliable to engineer Saturn-compatible CD-Rs (or offer a disc-pressing service) at that rate. Considering the only use is to defeat old copy protection, it's not going to have a market large enough to sustain it. So you're going to have high prices, and low enough product sales that it would probably not be worth inviting the legal trouble. Even after all that, CD-Rs can have all sorts of QA issues that can affect their shelf life. And then you still have the problem mentioned in the video where the drive hardware fails.
Replacing it with flash data is just a better long-term solution.
I can assure you, I am not looking forward to the TPP!
To achieve this did not require fully reverse engineering the cdrom controller but it is great someone did though.
The nice thing about this new solution, even ignoring that it furthers public understanding of the hardware, is that it's a simple module that plugs into a slot already available and accessible on every Saturn ever sold by SEGA (presumably it won't work on the Hi-Saturn units made by Hitachi, as they had the MPEG hardware integrated, though they are also very rare and very expensive).
For PCB assembly, http://www.4pcb.com/ is recommended.
Some reviews from Lady Ada: http://www.ladyada.net/library/pcb/manufacturers.html
Also check out http://pcbshopper.com/
Not sure about assembling all the parts into the case. Depending on who does the PCB production and assembly, they might also offer a full assembly service, or not.
The Factory Floor series[2] by Bunnie Huang might be an interesting read about some of the steps necessary for getting an idea to production.
Thanks again!
Sega should really make an HD remastering of all of them though. Or even a new one. Especially after the sadness of Star Fox Zero.