Saturn memory card?

[Hairydavey]

Bear with me here, I've never owned a Sega saturn before so im a bit newbish to using it. I picked one up with an aftermarket 8mb card, but when I try and boot the console with a game in the drive and the card in the cartridge slot, the console goes straight to the cd menu rather than booting ingame.

Could somebody please tell me how to use it, or give me directions on what im doing wrong!?

Well aware there's probably a stupidly easy explanation for it!

Ta!

[Yakumo]

Sounds like you have a crappy 3rd party saturn card. I have a few Saturn cards but none make the system go to the CD player screen. However all my cards are Sega made.

Yakumo

[Shinebi]

Does it work at all? I, mean, is it only when you power up the console, or even when you try to boot a game from the menu? I also own a 8MB card(sold my Euro and Jap cart), I think it's made by Performance. Works fine, but I think at first I had something similar, It should be okay after a while, though...
Leave it in the slot for a while with the console powered up. (battery charges?) You can always format it from the menu, I think.
If it doesnt' work after that, I don't know what could cause it to malfunction.

[Hairydavey]

Looks like im going to have a prat around with it I think, with the card in the slot, as soon as I power up it goes straight to the cd player with a game in, although will try to boot the game from the menu as you said next time I get round to having a go at it!

I might have just landed a duff memory card, as it's made by a 3rd party make that i've never heard of.

[NeoStuey]

Just a wild guess, but do you think it might be some sort of import game enabling memory card, perhaps that's why it takes you to the CD player screen first?

[Hairydavey]

I think it's just a bog standard 3rd party one, as it's boxed (no instructions and no references on the box with regards to imports) and made by a company called Max Play, whoever they are. The cartridge is bright white with a Max Play sticker on it incase anyone's seen one before.

I'll have a tinker round with it tonight and clean the contacts and see what I come up with! Otherwise I'll have to try and hunt down an original Sega one.

The dead battery theory sounds pretty plausable, shall leave it in the console for a few hours with the power on to see if that does anything (ta for the idea shinebi).

[thegreathopper]

Saturn

Just in case you did not know, you can save games on a Saturn without the external memory card.

[Hairydavey]

True, but just would be nice to have that extra 8mb to save games with. Just about to dig it out of it's box now and have a play, hopefully I can sort it!

[Shinebi]

Well, I just started playing again on the Saturn. It's been a while, 'cause I was busy with other projects (finally a successful install of regionswitch + 60Hz switch + modchip!!).

Guess what? The memcard does the same thing as yours. So I guess when powering up, the memcard boots as a game and then goes to the bios screen. You can tell as it shows a screen similar to the booting of a game (copyright stuff etc.) They prolly incorporated some boot sequence on the memcard's chip to recognize it (2 x normal size).

Oh well, it works, that's the most important to me

[Hairydavey]

No biggie to me now, the duff memory card has now gone the way of the bin as I was lucky enough to pick up 2 official ones. So now it's all good.

It never went to the bios screen but the menu player, on which it would then crash the system. Was a rather cheap looking 3rd party card anyways.