On that note, my step down converter finally arrived today. Pretty good considering I thought it was going to be another 2weeks at least. I went for This in the end:
https://airlinktransformers.com/product/japan-uk-voltage-converter-uk-ja0750
it’s fairly substantial and seems well built. I have other Japanese consoles I can use it with and to be honest after looking at all the psu variations and associated problems with replacements (interference etc.) I’m happy this was the correct route for me.
It was quite exciting to finally get everything connected, but also a little nerve racking as none of the components had been tested before, by me at least.
I was initially greeted by the Saturn splash screen (yay), then by some in Japanese (slightly daunting). Ok, so far so good. I put a disc in and the cd drive whizzed into life but in a nice quiet sort of way. However all I was greated with was some random Japanese text, followed by a black screen and no sound. Crap. I tried another disc, rebooted the unit but ultimately same thing. ####. Both discs can’t be bad surely?
I tried it again and decided to try and decipher the Japanese text. Luckily this time I noticed ‘4M’. Aha, silly boy. The two randomly chosen games I’d tried needed the 4meg ram cartridge.
Now with everything working I’m totally blown away. This thing is awesome! The games are pretty good, but the overall quality of everything, even the 240p display output is excellent. I’m very smitten, should have gotten one of these ages ago