Starting a Saturn library. Where do I start, what advice do you have, and questions.

[wiggyx]

Ha. I do read Japanese, and speak it, and on rare occasion even write it by hand.

Why not choose an English release? Because it's a waste of both money and space. It's so much easier (and substantially cheaper) to just own NTSC-J and nothing else. Plus I could go on a rant about how localization is shit and there's censorship, and the occasional instance where the localizing studio has a God Complex and decides they know better than the original dev and alter the balance of elements in the game etc. etc. but I need not bother, certainly you've heard it all before, and already understand all these aspects. Even if none of these were issues there is the inescapable fact that translating ruins the emotional feel; Japanese has too many grammatical functions that do not exist in other languages and so the depth of a character and certain jokes; lots of things in speech is lost the moment you give up the original script. I value this content much like the authenticity of the audio and video by using a real console.

I don't need any of that noise. Real system (Saturn in this case), true audio and video, no censorship or altercations. The way it's meant to be played.

Yeah, a waste for you, but I imagine about 99% of us here can't read or speak Japanese. Congrats to you for having that ability, but all the ranting in the world won't make JRPGs more playable for someone like myself, despite what may be a poor translation or having been sold in a case that's a "waste of space".

[FoxNtd]

Oh I didn't realize that having redundant duplicates of hardware and those extremely enormous and apparently fragile cases wasn't a waste of space. =P

I think the first time I saw the USA SS casing all I could say was "wtf".

The minute you consider overseas stuff against the original, a wild amount of silliness shows up, at least half of which just leaves me scratching my head as to how it came to be in the state it's in. o__O

[theclaw]

True. It's not feasible to try and narrow down the margin of error on that. To have a better idea how many people in Japan take care of their games than we do.
From what I can tell usually Japanese sellers don't bother advertising bad condition games to the west. I'm sure there has to be a "healthy" supply of beat up games within Japan we'll never know about.

[FoxNtd]

True. It's not feasible to try and narrow down the margin of error on that. To have a better idea how many people in Japan take care of their games than we do.
From what I can tell usually Japanese sellers don't bother advertising bad condition games to the west. I'm sure there has to be a "healthy" supply of beat up games within Japan we'll never know about.

There are more broken FDS and Twin FC units than you can shake a stick at, that much is certain. XD

Last time I spoke with someone who still owns an FDS, he said, "I'd like to play SMB2 but it's such a bother to change the FDS' belt."

Also there are a handful of items that are dirty, missing boxes, etc. Typically many people consider an item that's not CIB to be "JUNK". How's that for strict evaluation?

[GREEN00]

FoxNtd, it looks like I'm pretty much restricted to ebay and my local import store (which follows ebay pricing). so I'm just going to have to accept the inflated western prices on the japanese games.

So, I'm currently looking to buy in the near future,

-US Saturn console ($30ish, though a local craigslist offer has it for $45+Albert Odyssey)
-Action Replay 4M Plus ($25)

[Rickstilwell1]

There are more broken FDS and Twin FC units than you can shake a stick at, that much is certain. XD

Last time I spoke with someone who still owns an FDS, he said, "I'd like to play SMB2 but it's such a bother to change the FDS' belt."

Also there are a handful of items that are dirty, missing boxes, etc. Typically many people consider an item that's not CIB to be "JUNK". How's that for strict evaluation?

Reminds me of how I felt about those Atari 2600 cartridges that took me so long to sell. For me in a world where flashcarts exist, something that's not CIB loses all the appeal it had. Especially with games that old where the labels are peeling themselves off.

[Gameguy]

FoxNtd, it looks like I'm pretty much restricted to ebay and my local import store (which follows ebay pricing). so I'm just going to have to accept the inflated western prices on the japanese games.

So, I'm currently looking to buy in the near future,

-US Saturn console ($30ish, though a local craigslist offer has it for $45+Albert Odyssey)
-Action Replay 4M Plus ($25)

Albert Odyssey is worth more than that by itself, if you can get a system with that consider it a nice bonus.

[FoxNtd]

FoxNtd, it looks like I'm pretty much restricted to ebay and my local import store

There's still plenty to see even on just ebay for SS games.

As for Albert Odyssey I recently sold it (to another DP member ) for $3 or $4. It was an OK game but as soon as I was done I felt that I probably would never have the itch to do a 2nd run so why keep it? Let the next guy enjoy it. Well whatever version of the game you buy give it a try at least once.

It's definitely not a $30+ RPG that's for sure. (RPGs that expensive are extremely rare in retro.) :P Yeah may as well point it out now, this is not just for SS. RPGs from Japan in general become worthless, just about all of them. Dropping only $3-5 at a time for 30-50 hours of gameplay a piece, how's that for entertainment value..

[Rickstilwell1]

There's still plenty to see even on just ebay for SS games.

As for Albert Odyssey I recently sold it (to another DP member ) for $3 or $4. It was an OK game but as soon as I was done I felt that I probably would never have the itch to do a 2nd run so why keep it? Let the next guy enjoy it. Well whatever version of the game you buy give it a try at least once.

It's definitely not a $30+ RPG that's for sure. (RPGs that expensive are extremely rare in retro.) :P Yeah may as well point it out now, this is not just for SS. RPGs from Japan in general become worthless, just about all of them. Dropping only $3-5 at a time for 30-50 hours of gameplay a piece, how's that for entertainment value..

At least in the US it's starting to become doable for the newer systems as RPGs are more mainstream than they used to be here. I got Blue Dragon for Xbox 360 for $5 and Fallout 3 for PS3 for $4.

[GREEN00]

There's still plenty to see even on just ebay for SS games.

As for Albert Odyssey I recently sold it (to another DP member ) for $3 or $4. It was an OK game but as soon as I was done I felt that I probably would never have the itch to do a 2nd run so why keep it? Let the next guy enjoy it. Well whatever version of the game you buy give it a try at least once.

It's definitely not a $30+ RPG that's for sure. (RPGs that expensive are extremely rare in retro.) :P Yeah may as well point it out now, this is not just for SS. RPGs from Japan in general become worthless, just about all of them. Dropping only $3-5 at a time for 30-50 hours of gameplay a piece, how's that for entertainment value..

$5 for japanese fluent buyers perhaps, but ebay has created a market for non-japanese speaking RPG fans like myself where $30 seems like the norm. It's just as well, I can accept a price hike within reason, the yen to dollar ratio does not favor western buyers right now, and I likely avoid excess shipping fees+wait times. And the benefit of buying these import games at a retail location are being able to look them over before I buy, and easily get a refund if it doesn't work.

[theclaw]

AR also enables PAL games on US Saturn, with one key difference: they will be run at 60hz.
That's OK if not far better in most cases. The few optimized titles would have issues.

[Gameguy]

There's still plenty to see even on just ebay for SS games.

As for Albert Odyssey I recently sold it (to another DP member ) for $3 or $4. It was an OK game but as soon as I was done I felt that I probably would never have the itch to do a 2nd run so why keep it? Let the next guy enjoy it. Well whatever version of the game you buy give it a try at least once.

It's definitely not a $30+ RPG that's for sure. (RPGs that expensive are extremely rare in retro.) :P Yeah may as well point it out now, this is not just for SS. RPGs from Japan in general become worthless, just about all of them. Dropping only $3-5 at a time for 30-50 hours of gameplay a piece, how's that for entertainment value..

Are you talking about the US version or Japanese? I assumed he meant a US Saturn was being sold locally with the US version of Albert Odyssey, that's still worth quite a bit complete.

[FoxNtd]

Yeah I was talking about the original being cheap as toilet paper; I know he mentioned buying a US SS with the US game with it.

[BlastProcessing402]

The Memory Card Plus is what I use. It both allows direct saving (unlike the GameShark which I used previously) and allows playing of imports.

It doesn't act as extra RAM for those games that need it, but I never played any of those games anyway.

[SaturnHST]

I recommend getting your console modded with the region-free bios and modchip. This way you can play any Saturn game from every region, retail discs or cd-rs. There is no need to toggle region-switches and it leaves your cartridge slot free for official memory and ram carts. You don't even have to mod it yourself. I know a guy on another forum who has modded at least 6 of my consoles for me.

I did start out playing imports with the Action Replay cart but there are some issues. Sometimes the cartridge slot will not detect the AR so you have to keep reseating it until it works. Also when ever you want to play a different import game, you have to reset the console and go through the AR's menu to bypass the region lockout again. There are some SNK games that have graphical glitches when used with the AR cart or any 4MB ram cart; I can't remember which ones but I'm pretty sure one or all of the King of Fighters and Samurai Spirits games has this issue. There is also a Gundam game that doesn't display the intro when used with the AR. And of course, you cannot play King of Fighters 95 or Ultraman: Hikari no Kyojin Densetsu since they require their own unique ROM cart. Then there's the issue with the inability to save directly to the AR cart.

So the AR is an easy and cheap option for playing imports, but once you build up a collection and get more into the system you might find it annoying to use.

[wiggyx]

It's most likely cheaper to just pick up a JP Saturn at this point than to ship it off to have in modded.

[Edmond Dantes]

Personally I have a model one Saturn and use a PAR 4M plus, and so far no problems.

But what's all this I hear about a fragile cartridge port? Someone explain to me what should eventually happen, because I have a hard time believing you can damage a system just by inserting and removing a cartridge a bunch of times. My NES still works, after all..

[gameofyou]

Personally I have a model one Saturn and use a PAR 4M plus, and so far no problems.

Agreed. There are very few games that will give you problems with a PAR 4M Plus. In fact, I can only think of a few. Ironically, though, the very first game the TC purchased (Panzer Dragoon Azel) is one of them. If you don't use a specific code, the game will not run.

[theclaw]

Any saved data larger than the Saturn internal memory is incompatible with PAR. Since there's no normal way to move files between it and a direct saving backup cart.
I believe Dezaemon 2 and Dragon Force are able to create such data.

[wiggyx]

Personally I have a model one Saturn and use a PAR 4M plus, and so far no problems.

But what's all this I hear about a fragile cartridge port? Someone explain to me what should eventually happen, because I have a hard time believing you can damage a system just by inserting and removing a cartridge a bunch of times. My NES still works, after all..

Not all cartridges and cartridge ports are the same.

First off, the PAR connector is about 1mm thicker than any 1st party cart. This alone causes undue wear on the port.

On top of that, the pins in the Saturn cart port are formed in a manner that they act like springs, much like all cart ports. The problem is that the are especially soft springs and that means they have a tendancy to loose their ability to make effective contact with ANY cart after repeated use.

I've seen at least one fellow go so far as to hard wire a memory cart to the board for this very reason. It can be quite maddening. As I stated before, if you stick a PAR into thing and never take it back out, then you may never have any problems. But I'd bet a fair amount of money that most any Saturn which has been mated to a PAR for a year or more won't get along with a 1st party cart.

This isn't some sort of myth or urban legend. Of the 10 or more Saturns that have passed through my possession, at least 2/3 have had issues with their cart ports, whether completely unresponsive, finicky, or otherwise, and there's really no way to fix them as far as I know.