Help with Chu Chu Rocket (Dreamcast)... Plays as a music CD

[Hobie-wan]

Need to burn slowly. 4X is best. The problem is most recent burners won't go that slow. Burn on an older slower drive if you can.

[tylerbgood]

...I made the revelation that the Dreamcast will play standard burned CD-Rs pretty late last night and it was the only place that was opened.

Haha, I remember the day I discovered the same thing a couple years ago. I was so excited I bought a spindle of discs from Rite-Aid.

It's possible that the discs are to blame, I've read about it being a problem when burning games in the past. The .cdi's from the link I gave you should all be self-booting, and if you're getting intermittent success getting the game to start it's surely not made to be used with a boot disc. I know certain models of the Dreamcast had problems with burned media. I don't recall which systems in particular though.

[jeffesaurusrex]

Yeah, I was pretty happy when I found it out. I can't believe all this time has passed and I never knew!

I've been selecting 8x on bootdreams but the speeds end up averaging about 10x anyways. This drive must not be capable of going that low.

I think I have an older drive I can install in this crappy desktop but the computer is realllly crappy and I'm afraid there won't be enough memory or something to burn correctly.

[Hobie-wan]

If you're worried and it's an old enough drive that can't recover from an interruption in the stream of data, just make sure nothing else is running and the screen saver is turned off.

[jeffesaurusrex]

I found the drive, I'm gonna install it and give it a shot once I get more CD-Rs.

On another note I cleaned the laser on the Dreamcast, and it seems like it reads ChuChu more times than not now. I had three successful boots and one fail in four tries, that's nowhere near a scientific sample but it's a lot better than before where I would likely have had three fails and one success (or worse).

Is it possible that even though the other games boot fine the laser is faulty? I have like ten days left to return the Dreamcast and get a different one or my 20 bucks back (probably the latter, they hardly ever stock Dreamcasts or games for it). But I'm afraid if I do I will end up worse off than with this one.

Edit:

http://www.teac.co.jp/dspd/product/optical/cd-w58e.html

That's the drive by the way. It's marked January 2001 on the case, so it's pretty old. Hopefully it works.