How is it even possible?

well, the dc has a special laser that reflects wrong cause the color of the cdr is wrong, so it hits the lens and melts it slowly.. after some days, it's dead. if you use dark blue ones, it can even get so bad that it burns through the lid or causes a fire!

*cough*

Or so I heard.
 
Ok, some people belive the stories, others don't. What happened to me was that after I burned Dead or Alive 2 for DC, and played it a couple of hours my DC started to make strange noises. I wasn't to worried about them at first but the morehours I played, the louder they became. The next day after coming home from school I turned on the DC for some rounds on Crazy Taxi (an original, not copied). The thing started as normal and did the DC intro, but then it went to the menue, unable to read the disk. I figured maybe it was scratched or something, so I took it out, and found that it was absolutly scratchless, the way I try to keep all my games. I tried some other games of mine, and none worked. In the end, My DC's main disk drive went shot, and I ended up putting in a new one. My DC worked fine up until using that game, in fact, I had only had it for 3 months at that point, so you be the judge: Was it the burned game that messed up my DC disk drive, or did it, a 3 month old drive, go shot for no reason at all.

(Edited by Fabrizo at 2:06 pm on Nov. 2, 2001)
 
I do not suggest that the drive went dead for "no reason", but considering the nature of CD-ROM drives it's likely that there was already a defect in your unit if it died that soon, regardless of whether or not DOA was making it seek more often than it normally would.
 
I'Ve been using CDRs in my DC ever since they managed to create burnable images. constantly, all the time, for hours. my dc reads everything perfectly, no noises, no damage, nothing.
 
CD drives burning out is not all that uncommon. A few hours playing a CDR game couldn't do that alone anyhow. I've burned many emu's, home-bru ports, and games that I couldn't find to rent first before buying, and I've never had a problem. (And I use Imation discs, widely considered the lowest quality on the market.)
 
As long as anecdotal evidence is being presented, I also know someone whose DC has been subjected to more than a couple hours of CD-R Crazy Taxi (hint - it's worse than DOA2; CT's (ab)use of the GD-ROM drive was the primary reason people started padding burned DC games) and still works fine.

edit: fixed an "off by one column" spelling error... hate those :).

(Edited by ExCyber at 3:51 pm on Nov. 2, 2001)
 
Well, I never said that I didn't use emu's and such for the system, I do all the time. The reason that DOA2 burned my drive out I belive, was that I hadn't taken the time to burn the image to the outer rim of the disk, which is the way it is supposed to be done so as to make the reading of it easyer on the drive. Seeing as how I burned to the inner rim, it made the disk harder to read, making the loading process take far longer then normal. Durring all the hours I was playing, the system NEVER stopped reading. Emus are not hard on the systems drive at all, the reason is that programs like DreamSNES and NesterDC load their program into internal memory, and after the disk is swapped over to the roms one, it can load the entire games into itself all at once, making it so the drive can sit idle for the remander of play on any specific game. Im not sure about bleemcast though, seeing as how it uses uncompressed disks (the playstation ones), which obviously cant be loaded into internal memory. Anyone here have Bleemcast?
 
Fab - you just got a DC with a bad laser unit. Your burned DOA2 experience was just a bad luck coincidence. There's no way it could have caused your DC's death.
 
I had what I think was one of the last models of the DC to come out. I would think that by the time my model came out sega would have fixed the dad drive problem. I have heard though from some people that some of the later models had a new protection code put into them that would do one of two things, 1. make it so that copied games didn't run, or 2. make the drive wear out fast. I don't realy belive that to be true, but its just one more of many different things people have said about the reliability of the system. I love the DC, but I don't trust its longlivity worth anything in comparison with my saturn and sega CD units.
 
I don't see why the DC would have any trouble reading CD-ROM in general - all the info I've seen so far suggests that the actual reader mechanism is 100% standard (insofar as such things are standardized).
 
But wouldnt the beam have to be more concentrated in order to read the highly compressed data on a DC disk? If so, that would make it so the lense had to be more precise in its movements, as well as having to move more.
 
But wouldnt the beam have to be more concentrated in order to read the highly compressed data on a DC disk?

Not that I'm aware of. So far, I've seen no credible evidence that GD-ROM is physically much different than CD-ROM. Based on what I know about CD, I think it's likely that the GD area is essentially an "overclocked" CD data channel, and the reader is then "underclocked" so that the stream looks like a normal CD data channel to the decoding electronics.

Besides, why would they bother developing a new format that requires custom low-level physical specifications (which would likely mean custom disc pressing equipment as well as custom drive reader development and production costs) just to get 300-400MB more on the discs? It would make much more sense to use technology that is compatible with CD-ROM so that readily available devices and facilities could be used.

Anyway, I doubt we'll know for sure either way unless someone at Sega or Yamaha starts talking...
 
Apparently John Byrd, or someone claiming to be him, (but it seemed genuine to me), former head of Developer Technical Support at Sega of America Dreamcast did post on several hobbyist coding lists. I believe I've actually seen posts on the NetBSD-Dreamcast list and the Hitmen dcdev list. Someone else here mentioned posts at dcemulation.com. IIRC, the posts on the hitmen list looked like he was trying to get some information from homebrew developers on what would work as an acceptable license compromise between homebrew developers and Sega (as it is, distributing disc images, even of freeware stuff, is only borderline legal because the bootstrap code on a DC disc is required by the BIOS to be specific Sega-owned code; the same is true of SCD and Saturn). Not surprisingly, he apparently lost his job at SOADC right around the time Sega announced their exit from the hardware market.
 
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