I know it's a dumb question, but have you changed the battery? I imagine that'd be cheaper than buying another Saturn whose battery is also slowing down.
Yeah, that's the first thing I tried, but thanks for asking. I think it's a problem with the internal memory itself. Any time I start it up, if I look at what's stored in the memory (usually a coherent list of game saves), it's just a bunch of entries that are a garbled mess. I can delete them, but a new set of them is back the next time I start it. Unfortunately, it also seems to interfere with the functioning of my PAR so it's hard to get Japanese games to boot up correctly -- they usually come up with an error message, which a kind bilingual forum-goer confirmed is a message about the memory. I think I should just replace the Saturn because eventually I want to mod it.
@Barry: Azel does have cooler cover art. If you go that way, you're probably gonna end up getting (and keeping) both versions! The U.S. cover art is so-so... better than average for that era when cover art became dominated by CG renders that, unfortunately, have not stood the test of time in most cases. But still not as cool as a Moebius illustration!