Nearly 23 years after it was launched in 1994, the Sega Saturn protection has finally been cracked.
Before the breakthrough, hardware enthusiasts have been worried that the Saturn was on its way to extinction due to the shortage of replacement parts and the increasingly common disc drive failures. Luckily, engineer James Laird-Wah was able to crack the classic console's copy protection and set it to run games from a USB stick.
"This is now at the point where, not only can it boot and run games, I've finished just recently putting in audio support, so it can play audio tracks," Laird-Wah told YouTuber debuglive.
"For the time being, I possess the only Saturn in the world that's capable of writing files to a USB stick. There's actually, for developers of homebrew, the ability to read and write files on the USB stick that's attached to the device."
James originally started hacking the console in an attempt to harness its chiptune capabilities. "I'm personally hoping to go back to the original plan, back to chip music, and in that case you'll be able to load samples and store your songs on your USB."
James is currently tweaking and ironing his hack but he hopes to share it with the world soon in order to help preserve the Saturn's library of classic games.
