I’ve got four Sega Saturns from two owners on the way: three functional and one broken.

Broken in what way? Even the seller didn’t know. Should be very interesting.

Three of them are Model 1s and one is a Model 2. I already have two functional Model 2 Saturns, but I guess another one can’t hurt.

The Model 1 Saturns I had encountered so far seemed to be showing more age-related faults than my Model 2 units, although Saturn internals vary considerably by motherboard and PSU revision. It’ll be interesting to see just how functional the three “working” Saturns actually are.

They also come with a bunch of games, which is always good.

On the Game Gear front, I discovered a badly leaking capacitor near the LCD area in my current machine. That is a likely contributor to the missing display, so capacitor kits are on order and should arrive in the next week or so.

I also bought another Game Gear to steal the D-pad from because the one in my current unit has degraded and disintegrated!

The plan is to end up with one primary Game Gear and one backup or half-working Game Gear. I picked up some games as well since they were going cheap.

Sources

• Sega-16 Forums - Sega Saturn Revisions and Models Guide - documents the range of motherboard and PSU revisions found across Model 1 and Model 2 Saturns.
• iFixit - Sega Game Gear Capacitor Replacement - documents capacitor leakage and failure as common causes of Game Gear audio and display faults.