Laird-Wah started poking around the Saturn in 2013, attracted to the machine’s notoriously ambitious multi-channel sound chip. “Gee, it’d be nice to have one of those around,” he said. To take advantage of that chip, he wanted to write software for the Saturn.

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What he found was that Saturn homebrew required a mod chip—which largely aren’t produced anymore—and burning CDs for the Saturn to read.

“We can probably do better,” he said.

Thus, he went down a rabbit hole requiring years of reverse engineering.

The reason it’s so notoriously hard to crack the Saturn is because of its hardware-based DRM, which required discs to have a physical mark—called a wobble—that was etched into the CD. Laird-Wah had to figure out a way for the Saturn to tell him out the disc drive worked, then come up with software that would allow him to emulate the disc drive over USB.

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The end product looks like this:

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This isn’t something you can buy yet; Laird-Wah is working out the kinks. Still, it’s a promising move towards revitalizing the Saturn community and ensuring the native hardware can be used to play games for years to come.