Saturn Behaving Badly

[uf_nihongo84]

Hello all, I have recently become interested in the Sega Saturn and, as such, decided to purchase one off of eBay. When it arrived today, it worked fine, in fact, I was able to try out a few CDs and play half an hour or so of Sonic 3D before I ran off to do some errands . HOWEVER, it then began behaving rather oddly. Sometimes it plays CDs, sometimes it doesn't. When it doesn't, the access light flashes a few times, then stops, and I simply receive a black screen. Other times, it will play the CD, but only for a few minutes before going to black screen again. It's never the same amount of play time, it just stops at some point, but generally within 5 minutes.

Upon further inspection with an audio CD, I found that it will play continuously without a problem. I can adjust pitch and surround sound, but if I try to skip to the next track, or go to a previous one, the system crashes to that black screen again. Bah...

Does this sound familiar to anybody? And does anyone know what I can do to fix it? The only thing I have done with this system is replace the battery, which was already dead when I bought it.

Regards,
Theodore Brown

[NFG]

It sounds like a failing CD drive, but that's my standard response.  Unfortunately given the paucity of replacement parts, it's almost always cheaper to replace a Saturn than fix it.

[Segasonicfan]

yea, sounds like a failed cd drive.  i have a replacement lens though.  if you want to buy one off me or sell your broken saturn to me let me know

-Segasonicfan