Video CD Card

The video decoder card is a daughtercard-like peripheral that plugs inside the Sega Saturn though the door the battery is accessed from. It allows hardware playback of MPEG-1 (version 1) video in certain games, as well as playback of Video CDs (White Book). There were versions this card manufactured by Sega, JVC, and Hitachi. There have also been reports of unlicensed video decoder cards.

A version of the card manufactured by Sega was also sold in Europe.

There are 3 versions of the JVC MPEG card. The first is more-or-less like the Sega card, and the second was called the Twin Operator and added support for PhotoCD. The third is just like the second but comes in a different package and sold for a lower price. The interesting thing about the JVC Twin Operator card is that it is both NTSC and PAL compatible and comes with instructions that are written in both English and Japanese.

These cards are somewhere hard to find now, but probably a lot easier if you're in Asia, the UK, or have a good import source.

Games that used the card include (not necessarily complete list):

• Lunar Silver Star Story complete MPEG version (the only game that requires the card)
• Sakura Taisen Hangumi Tsuushin
• Sakura Taisen Nekki Radio Show (a.k.a. Steam Radio Show)
• Vatlva
• Chisato Moritaka disc
• Moon Cradle
• Wangan Deadheat + Triangle Love
• Falcom Classics 1 (disc 2 of the limited edition)
• Gungriffon 1 (Japanese version only)

Only one of these games was released in the US (see below), and VCDs never really caught on outside of Asia (instead, technology has evolved for DVD, which is far superior in that it uses MPEG-2 compression). VCD resolution is 352x288 for PAL and 352x240 for NTSC.

The US version of Gungriffon still has MPEG movies on the disc but that they are not played during the game. Instead, the in-game movies have been apparently converted to Cinepak or Truemotion.

The card fits in all versions of the Japanese Saturn (the Hi-Saturn naturally comes with MPEG capability). Early Japanese Saturns (i.e. the gray ones) have the connector for it on a second circuit board inside the unit, later ones have the connector on the main board. It cards should work in all versions of the US Saturn, but you'll need a language switch to play the above list of software.