Reply To: Investigating the Black Screen Faults in the Sega Saturn
It’s definitely not always, as I have repaired a bunch of Black Screen faults which indicates general hardware failure. Usually excess heat getting to the PLL damages it, but that’s not always the case. Sometimes a reflow, 1 person fixed there’s by reflowing the PLL chip though recommend to be quick with the reflow using flux and lead free solder, and or a recap, or replacing the Clock battery, PSU, bad inductors labelled L1 and beyond, or replacing the VHC04 IC fixes it or there could be a bad trace somewhere. It’s always worth diagnosing it to determine what’s really going on. I wish I had and knew how to use an Oscilloscope, since this will need a Schematic level investigation. But I do wish somebody with the skills can manage to reverse engineer the heat sensitive PLL IC’s code since there are likely substitute IC’s out there to replace it, perhaps integrate the DFO mod into it with the ability to switch from 50 to 60hz.
