PC Engine Newbie - Existential Concerns?

[Shokwav]

So, I have recently decided to OBEY and start collection PC Engine games. Mainly because of how damn sexy the cases looks stacked up on a shelf... anyways, I had some concerns before I started collecting. Chiefly, I'm talking about disk rot. The Dreamcast and Sega CD are notorious for this, and I was wondering if anyone has experienced this on the PC Engine? I can only imagine the horror of paying $350 for a copy of Sapphire, only to find that the game starts freezing up, or the audio starts glitching up... is this a legitimate concern?

[esteban]

Indeed, you are more in danger of the dreaded GOUGE in a CD than disc rot.

I still have all my CD's/TG-CD from mid-80's onward and have yet to experience any problems.

My copy of DEII, sadly, has a gouge in it, though. It ruins one of the audio tracks.

[Shokwav]

Indeed, you are more in danger of the dreaded GOUGE in a CD than disc rot.

I still have all my CD's/TG-CD from mid-80's onward and have yet to experience any problems.

My copy of DEII, sadly, has a gouge in it, though. It ruins one of the audio tracks.

What exactly is a disk gouge? Is it just an error in the manufacturing?

[esteban]

Indeed, you are more in danger of the dreaded GOUGE in a CD than disc rot.

I still have all my CD's/TG-CD from mid-80's onward and have yet to experience any problems.

My copy of DEII, sadly, has a gouge in it, though. It ruins one of the audio tracks.

What exactly is a disk gouge? Is it just an error in the manufacturing?

Comrade, it's a deep hole/scratch that can't be fixed (surface scratches can be minimized, usually).

[ultrageranium]

Discs with minor scratches that might lead to extra work for the tracking system of the CD player can be resurfaced.

Disc rot is however impossible to fix. While I am lucky to not have (yet) a CD stored console game that got damaged, I have a few silver CD audio bought in the nineties that are affected by debonding or corrosion, and many more cheap CD-R that are just dead now.

Depending on the source, the announced life expectancy of a silver CD greatly varies from 50 to 200 years, given it is stored in ideal conditions and did not have manufacturing defect to start with.

Bottom line, depending how old you are and the speculated quality of PCE CD, all, most, or only some should survive you, and not forever. Obviously, more and more problems will emerge in the coming decades, you can avoid the worst by always examining carefully against the light your purchases, and pay a close look to the inner and outer borders.

So I'd say it's a legitimate question, but it will ultimately be weighted by what is driving your collection purpose. Games are meant to be played one might say naively, so disc rot seems important right now, but looking at examples of collecting other much older cultural artefacts, you will often see that the motivation can shift through time. For instance, wine bottles that are initially meant to be drunk, can end up past their acceptable consumption date (meaning it has became dead corpse juice) yet be still highly collectable. So I can imagine that once all the Sapphire copies (including sealed) will have rotten, they will be still valuable, maybe more, maybe less, to a few, somewhere, sometime, even it is to end up behind a glass window, next to the first Fisher-Price walking dog toy and a scary looking porcelain doll. I'd still rather play a skipping Sapphire that crashes after the first 5 minutes, while riding the dog and the doll on my lap, but YMMV.

Good luck.

[Shokwav]

Discs with minor scratches that might lead to extra work for the tracking system of the CD player can be resurfaced.

Disc rot is however impossible to fix. While I am lucky to not have (yet) a CD stored console game that got damaged, I have a few silver CD audio bought in the nineties that are affected by debonding or corrosion, and many more cheap CD-R that are just dead now.

Depending on the source, the announced life expectancy of a silver CD greatly varies from 50 to 200 years, given it is stored in ideal conditions and did not have manufacturing defect to start with.

Bottom line, depending how old you are and the speculated quality of PCE CD, all, most, or only some should survive you, and not forever. Obviously, more and more problems will emerge in the coming decades, you can avoid the worst by always examining carefully against the light your purchases, and pay a close look to the inner and outer borders.

So I'd say it's a legitimate question, but it will ultimately be weighted by what is driving your collection purpose. Games are meant to be played one might say naively, so disc rot seems important right now, but looking at examples of collecting other much older cultural artefacts, you will often see that the motivation can shift through time. For instance, wine bottles that are initially meant to be drunk, can end up past their acceptable consumption date (meaning it has became dead corpse juice) yet be still highly collectable. So I can imagine that once all the Sapphire copies (including sealed) will have rotten, they will be still valuable, maybe more, maybe less, to a few, somewhere, sometime, even it is to end up behind a glass window, next to the first Fisher-Price walking dog toy and a scary looking porcelain doll. I'd still rather play a skipping Sapphire that crashes after the first 5 minutes, while riding the dog and the doll on my lap, but YMMV.

Good luck.

Really great write-up; thanks for this. Perhaps wel'll even see the disk-games outliving the HuCards...

[cjameslv]

Disc rot doesn't affect games on a shelf. So long as you don't play them they'll look fine.

In all honesty, I have never had any bad discs aside from scratchy ones.

Pfft scratchy ones, that doesn't effect me  I bought this rti eco-senior II a couple years ago. Best machine ever, fixes every type of cd/dvd/bluray etc.:

[spenoza]

Disc rot doesn't have a lot to do with use. If the disc is poorly sealed the inner aluminum layer is vulnerable to oxidizing whether the disc is played or not. Discs from the mid 90s to the early 2000s are the most susceptible, I think. In the 80s discs were made very well, but as they became more and more mass produced and mfgers looked for cheaper production methods, flaws increased. I have a Dream Theater CD that I've already lost 2 tracks from due to disc rot.

[xelement5x]

Disc rot doesn't affect games on a shelf. So long as you don't play them they'll look fine.

In all honesty, I have never had any bad discs aside from scratchy ones.

Pfft scratchy ones, that doesn't effect me  I bought this rti eco-senior II a couple years ago. Best machine ever, fixes every type of cd/dvd/bluray etc.:

I didn't think you could resurface blu-rays. 

[cjameslv]

I didn't think you could resurface blu-rays.

Yeah you can unless it's a really deep scratch then your SOL.

[xelement5x]

I didn't think you could resurface blu-rays.

Yeah you can unless it's a really deep scratch then your SOL.

Interesting.  I was always told that because that layer on them is already super hard you can't resurface it without risking screwing up the data layer really easily.  I've looked at a JFJ Easy Pro a couple times but can't pull the trigger on it yet. 



Oh, and the Sega CD has no more proclivity for 'disc rot' than anything or CD-ROM from the era in my experience.  You can nick the top label a lot easier though since many of the games are just screen printed like on the top, instead of full color artwork. 

Dreamcast GDROMs are a whole other format too, but I was told the problem there is from minor scratches making it more difficult to read because of the denseness of the disc data.