What happens?
So your Satiator won't boot… where do you begin?
First of all, check your Saturn's backup battery - if the battery's flat, it won't even try and start the Satiator, and you'll just land on the CD player screen. Usually you can tell the battery's flat because it'll ask you to set the time and language when you power it on.
If your Saturn battery is OK, look at the LED on the Satiator when you power the console on. What is it doing?
If the LED is red, it usually means the Satiator hasn't been pushed all the way into the slot. On some consoles, you may need to give it a firm push to seat it all the way. It's also possible that the cartridge just needs to be reseated.
An orange LED means that the Satiator is waiting for the Saturn to begin talking to it. This is most commonly caused by bad contacts; the Video CD slots on our consoles are getting on a little these days! Depending on your slot's condition, you may need to reinsert the cartridge quite a number of times for it to make good contact.
You will also get an orange LED if something else interrupts the boot process, for example an Action Replay cartridge or an inserted game. This includes other ODEs which launch their own menu on boot.
Your Satiator is not making contact with the cartridge connector. Start by pulling it out and checking the orientation. The Satiator logo should be facing up. Insert it firmly to make sure it's fully seated. You should be able to close the console's Video CD door without it touching the SD card.
If your Satiator's booting but it can't find the menu on the SD card, it'll display an error message on the Saturn.
If it says it can't find menu.bin, then grab a copy of the menu from https://info.satiator.net/menu/latest.zip and unzip it on to the SD card.
If it says it can't find a FAT or exFAT filesystem on your card, then your SD card is corrupt or not correctly formatted. Reformat it to resolve the issue, or try a different card.
If you end up sitting at the CD player with a “Disc Unsuitable” message, try removing your SD card and rebooting your Saturn. If you now get past the CD player and get a message from the Satiator saying there's no SD card, then try another card.
If something's up that would prevent the Satiator from starting, it will blink a code on its LED. This table shows the meaning of all the codes:
| ●●● | Three short green | Firmware update was successful. Turn power off and on to continue |
| ▬ ▬ ● | Two long red, one short green | Firmware update was interrupted. Follow these instructions to recover |
| ▬ ▬ ●●● | Two long red, three short green | The satiator.fw on your card is corrupt; download a fresh copy and try again |
| ▬ ● | One long red, one short green | There was an error reading the SD card while emulating a CD. Check your card and the filesystem on it |
If you remove power to the Satiator while it's performing a firmware upgrade, it will be incompletely flashed. On some Satiators, the Satiator will not attempt to reflash the same version of firmware. The LED will blink ▬ ▬ ● when you power on.
The way to resolve this is to take a *different* version of the firmware to the one you were trying to upgrade to. Put that other satiator.fw on your SD card, power up the Satiator, and let it flash completely (LED ●●● ). Then, replace it with the satiator.fw you were trying to load originally, and again let it flash completely (LED ●●● ).
This issue was fixed in bootloader version 5.
Some menu versions prior to 59 had a bug where they would go to a black screen on launching a game, before the Sega logo normally appears.
To resolve the issue, upgrade to a newer version of the menu, like the latest one.