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BoneSnapDeez wrote:Xak? Ys? You want authentic copies of those glorious games in your collection, surely!

Oh, of course I do, but man, TGCD games are expensive! I'll be keeping my eye open for 'em, though.

Exhuminator wrote:Told you so bro. Looking forward to copious reviews of TGCD/PCECD gems.

Yep, you sure did! Nothing like legit TYs, apparently. When I can't get those anymore, I'm going to look into trying the Verbatim DataLife Plus AZO discs. I've heard those are also excellent, and might be a better option if the CMC Pro discs don't hold up compared to these JVC TYs I'm using.

Now I'm tempted to see how well these discs will work with an original PSX. I always had issues getting them to work there, but I'm thinking it might actually work swimmingly now. (But I need to save as much as I can for the Duo, heh!)

Sarge wrote:Now I'm tempted to see how well these discs will work with an original PSX.

TY CDs worked fine for me in PS1 and Dreamcast. If you want to know a good deal on TY DVDs let me know. (I use those in PS2.)

I'm just glad this TGCD venture worked out well for you in the end. I know how long you've wanted one of these.

BoneSnapDeez wrote:Xak? Ys? You want authentic copies of those glorious games in your collection, surely!

Do the translation patches for Xak and Ys work on a real TurboDuo? Maybe that's why he wants the burned copies?

An older burn I have of Xak III works, yes. I'm pretty sure the ISO I have right now was ripped via CloneCD, probably from that copy. I'm guessing there's something with the way it ripped that isn't kosher.

I'm going to monkey with getting Ys IV up and running at some point. I'm going to start using an emulator to ensure things are working properly, though. I burned a copy of Dragon Slayer that barfed in the system but worked in Ootake (and didn't in Magic Engine). But downloading a proper BIN/CUE did the trick and it works now. I have a feeling I'm going to end up with a lot of coasters before this is over with...

Slowly, I'll start trying to get legit stuff. I figure the collection is going to stay pretty small, though; I don't really have the money to blow on everything I want on there. (That's also why I ordered a Turbo EverDrive.)

EDIT: Aaaand Ys IV works. It took some shenanigans, though. The version I downloaded was pre-patched with both the text translation and an English dub. I've fiddled with the text alone, but not understanding what the characters are saying in audio with no text alongside is a bit annoying. Unfortunately, it was packaged in ISO + OGG format; great for distributing for use with Mednafen (and small to boot), but not great for burning programs. So I took Winamp and converted the OGGs to WAV, modified the CUE sheet, mounted the ISO + WAV in Daemon Tools, used ImgBurn to copy the virtual image to a BIN/CUE, and tested to make sure that it works in Magic Engine. That seems to be the best way for me to make sure I don't produce a coaster. If Magic Engine doesn't like it, the Duo probably doesn't like it, either.

I'm already getting annoyed at the lack of save space on this thing, though. Hopefully the TED gives some options on that front to backup saves.

Welp, that's annoying. I'm going to have to try different burners again. That copy of Ys III worked great all the way to the end, then barfed out on what I assume are the last two audio tracks. I was able to continue (I popped the lid open and closed it again) without audio, but man. Starting to think I just need to get a new laser, or that my burners suck terribly.

EDIT: Ugh, what works is a complete crapshoot. Kaze Kiri goes all the way to the end, but the 4-in-1 disc barfs on the intro and loading Bonk's Revenge. Need a better burner... or I'm starting to wonder if these TYs are legit.

I'd like to update this and let folks know a little more about what I've found out. I think I may restate some stuff, but here's the latest scoop!

I ended up ordering a new CD burner... and by "new" I actually mean that it's an old PlexWriter 16/10/40A. Before that, I was using a GCC-4240N that was built into an old Inspiron 8200 laptop, which is a Hitachi/LG drive. That combined with the Sony discs gave me burns that weren't perfect, but better than anything else.

With the new drive, I've improved the performance at least a little bit, with an interesting catch. It still misses the intro audio track occasionally on the 4-in-1 disc, which seems to be a great test of how things are working, as it turns out. But it managed to nail it like five times in a row, which is great compared to what I was getting. But the other thing is that burning at 1x with the Sony discs was worse than anything I'd used. 4x was much better, which leads me to conclude that the statements about modern-ish media not really being designed to handle burn speeds that low is absolutely correct. So the 1x burning does me no good with this drive, at least so far.

I also tested with the Taiyo Yuden discs, and performance was completely identical to what I'd seen with them when I burned at 4x using the laptop drive, and not really much difference that I could detect at either 1x or 4x, to boot. So the TYs seem to handle the low speed burn better, but again, I think it's just the quirks of this Duo.

Just for kicks, I also tried burning Syphon Filter 3 for PSX, and didn't get it to work with the TY discs at 1x. I need to try a different game, though; there could be problems with my rip. But my old model PSX has also always had issues with reading CD-Rs, and I never tried to tweak the pot since retail games always worked perfectly. No sense screwing that up! (I also don't use the old PSX anymore, since the PS2s run most of the games flawlessly, and I can also get component out of the PS2 easily.)

EDIT: Tried out burning Policenauts and Tales of Phantasia for PSX, and they work. The videos even play. Very interesting. I'm not sure the disc movement sounds quite right, though, so it wouldn't surprise me if it was still struggling a bit. Smooth FMV is still better than I ever got back in the day, so that's pretty cool.