Burning PC Engine ISO images

[gtmtnbiker]

On a gamecube, you need to tweak the pot in order to read DVD-Rs. This means lowering the resistance thereby increasing the amount of current to the laser. This shortens the lifespan of the laser. By how much, I can't say.

[Ziggy]

Lens, laser, you know what I mean! Yeah, yeah. "If it's having a hard time reading the disc, you should clean the laser." - "Oh yeah? How does one clean a laser?" The question is, will the drive have a harder time reading a burn, and will that cause it to wear out sooner than it would.

It's no question that some older drives have a hard time reading burns. I use to have old CD players that would have a hard time playing burned CDs (back when I burned everything at the fastest speed). I've burned DVDs for friends (at slow speeds) that had a hard time playing them on older DVD players. In both cases, the units played hard pressed disc just fine.

And I'm not arguing that the drives have to work a LOT harder to read burns, or that it puts a lot of stress on them and causes them to wear out very quickly. I'm just saying, they might have to work a little harder to read them than hard pressed. And I'm really only talking about older consoles.

But anyways, I read some where that the laser voltage is adjusted while reading a disc. If this is true, and the voltage isn't static, then that might be an easy test. If you could probe the voltage, you could get the values for hard pressed discs and then compare it to burns.

[Hobie-wan]

CDRs destroying lasers is largely a myth.

CDRs are less reflective than pressed discs. The data pits on a pressed disc will be better defined than ones created by the burning process, especially at higher speeds. These are facts. Reading data pits that don't reflect as much light and have less accurate starts and ends will therefore be 'harder'. If it reads a section of data ok, great. If if missed a bit and the checksum fails the drive might have to go back and read that chunk if data again. It had to read that bit twice, which is by definition more work than once. The laser had to create a beam just that little bit longer and the drive had to spin and seek just a little longer.

I don't understand why some people always insist that CDRs aren't harder to read. Obviously it's not going to kill a drive next week as opposed to years from now unless the drive is already failing, it just boggles me why people (in general) argue the other side every time this discussion comes up.