If you've been anywhere near AliExpress recently, you'll surely have noticed a proliferation of modded Saturn consoles which have had their CD drives removed and are primarily intended for use with a Saroo flash cart, which allows all titles to be loaded from the console's cartridge slot.
There's a flood of these hacked systems coming out of China these days, often with transparent cases which show off the Saturn's internals. The idea is that by using a Saroo to load games, you don't need the CD drive, effectively making it a "Saturn Mini" due to the reduction in height. Some systems even come with bolt-on LCD monitors.
It's been assumed by some people that the consoles used in these mods have faulty CD drives (something we're not entirely sure is the case, given the reputation AliExpress modders tend to have these days), but even so, members of the retro gaming community are coming together to voice their concern with the practice, encouraging people to avoid buying them.
"Temporarily breaking my Twitter death to discourage the Saturn scene from buying these 'mini Saroo Saturns' that keep popping up on Ali Express and the like," says @PandaMoniumGR, creator of that amazing Sega Rally documentary you might have seen recently. "I do not like the idea of hacking up the limited functional Saturns we have left and locking them away to Saroo use."
Modder @Voultar agress:
I'm going to co-sign this. All of those garbage 'portabilizer" consoles sold on Aliexpress are far more destructive than they are useful. There are far few Sega Saturn units in the wild than say Game Boys so it's not quite the same thing when you take a unit out of circulation.
Aware that many people might compare this to the rampant Game Boy modding scene, @Voultar argues that it's not a fair comparison to make:
Those mods are overwhelmingly reversible. You can keep your stock shells/buttons/components. The IPS/OLED replacement screen is basically a drop in at this point and you can effectively revert recently modded units back to stock form.
Saturn is believed to have sold just 9.26 million units during its lifetime (some insist it was more, but it's still much less than the Game Boy), so there's clearly a more pressing need to preserve the units that remain in active use.
CD drives fail, sure, but they can be fixed – and given that the Saroo cartridge requires the user to make zero modifications to the base system, it's somewhat puzzling to see this trend of hacking Saturns to use with the cart. You're effectively making the Saturn less useful, as it will no longer have the option of playing physical discs.
Still, some Saturn mods can look pretty cool – although it should be noted that Wesk's Saturn Slim is only a concept for the time being, and is just a shell; it requires the end user to supply the internals.