Grandia English Patch

Translating Grandia 1.1.1

I bought a nice Plextor burner and CMC Ty CD-Rs to make sure that I could rule the drive and media out for reasons why discs were having a hard time playing on my consoles.

I have a NA Model 1 Saturn that I want to play on, and its laser is brand new, but it has the most trouble reading my burned discs. I burned 7-8 different copies and my model 1 would boot maybe 1-2 of the discs I burned and then it would have such a hard time reading that it would crash or hang.

So I put the same discs in my NA Model 2 Saturn and it boots them no problem like they were stamped official from the Sega factory. The model 1 and 2 have different drives so I figure it must be that the model 2 drive handles poor burns / non standard burns better.

This is pretty frustrating because I really want to play this particular game on my Model 1 so I downloaded Opti Drive Control and some other stuff to try and check the quality of my burns. My Plextor only burns at a minimum speed of 10x even if I set it to 2x so I went to see if I could force that lower somehow. From what I read it turns out burning at a lower speed isn't necessarily better, and drives like my Plextor actually sometimes burn with less error at their mid range burn speeds.

So I burned a disc at 16x instead of 10x and my Model 1 booted it up easy. We'll see if this trend continues but all this is to say try burning your discs at a higher speed than 10 and see if that makes a difference, or swap to a Model 2 if you can. This is just my experience but I hope it helps!
 
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I should also mention that I'm using a Model 1 and have no access to a Model 2.

The JVC Professional grade discs (Ritek, Taiwan), were no better in the end. I'm going to try some AZO discs, again that I could find locally in Australia at a good price. Archival grade and anything made by CMC or Taiyo Yuden are expensive per disc to get imported to Australia so I'm trying my local options first.

Burning the Ritek Pro discs at 24x worked more reliably than burning at 10x or 16x for me and my burner, but still the furthest I could get was to the title screen, and again I only get to the garbled New Game selection, and a crash on trying to proceed any further.

Now awaiting the AZO CDs to try.
 
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Unless I missed something, you didn't specify what allows the burned CDs to boot on your Saturn.
Are you using a cartridge for that, Pseudo Saturn Kai or Saroo ?
If so, is the cartridge shielded ?

Lack of shielding in 3rd party Saturn cartridges (all Sega cartridges are shielded) can cause issues in some games and Grandia is one of them.
A burned CD of the translation patch of Grandia consistently crashed on startup with one of my PS Kai all in one cartridges until I added some copper tape in the inside of the cartridge shell to shield it.

See https://ppcenter.webou.net/pskai/compat/#diy_shield
 
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