It's been 21 years since Sega released the 32-bit Sega Saturn and slightly less than that since Sega discontinued support for the infamous failed console, but there are still small pockets of hardcore fans wanting to play old Saturn games someway, somehow.
Because it's been so long, the Sega Saturn's CD drives are beginning to malfunction, and gamers who are still playing on their Saturns are no longer able to. People have been trying to figure out a way to find some workaround to play Saturn games without using CDs. This is a little impossible due to the difficult DRM technology Sega built into the console, but a rather clever hardware engineer managed to get past it.
Kotaku reports that engineer James Laird-Wah, also known as Dr. Abrasive, found a way around the restrictive technology in order to load Sega Saturn games on a makeshift hardware setup through a mod chip that enabled games to be loaded via a USB drive. The hardest part for him was to recreate a working emulation of the Saturn's CD drive, which required game CDs to have a physical etching called a "wobble" in order for the console to play it.
After years of reverse-engineering the Sega Saturn's hardware and technology, he finally managed to devise a way for the console to bypass the CD drive, and also code software that would emulate the drive's technology via USB.
While Laird-Wah's endgame is to make this technology available to other Sega Saturn fans, he admits that it's still going to be a while away before more players get to play their old favorites. It'll just take patience, however—soon enough everyone who misses the Saturn can get their hands on titles like "Panzer Dragoon," "Virtua Fighter 1 and 2," among others.
