Bit rot in general is a massively overblown phenomenon. The most famous offender is Laserdisc but I have literally hundreds of the suckers and have only had one rotter, the vast majority of rotter LDs being either very early in the format's life or whatever crap Sony was pressing in the late 90s in their US factory.
The format with the worst percentage of rotters is probably HD-DVD. I only know this because for some stupid reason people actually collect this format despite there being almost no exclusives and the quality being identical to Bluray. If it had been allowed to continue then people would have been pretty pissed but the swift and unnatural death of the format kinda made it easy to forget. There are a lot of rotter HD-DVDs.
CDV is also a historically rot-prone format. Mainly this is because almost every PAL CDV has rotted and those are the ones people would probably want to collect. The ones made in and for Japan will probably outlast the island itself.
PCE CDs are the same, physically speaking, as audio CDs probably the most durable format on Earth. I don't see any reason to think the 25 year old games I have would behave differently than the 25 year old audio CDs I have that I bought the same day.
Regarding DC: There were a fair number of defective GD-ROMs even when the system was new. I specifically remember brand new copies of Crazy Taxi just not working. I've never experienced anything like this with my own collection but considering GD-ROM is essentially just a unilateral hack of CD-ROM I wouldn't be surprised if variations in DCs (not a complete POS, especially compared to today's complete garbage, but not at all reliable by 1990s Sega standards) and mastering/reproduction issues that are now being attributed to "rot" may have stacked up and made a particular disc unplayable on a particular player.
As for leaving discs in a car in the Texas sun. That's just stupid. I wouldn't leave change in a car in the TX sun for fear it would melt into a useless alloy ingot. There's a reason so few people lived there before the advent of air conditioning. It's less a state and more like a hostile alien planet, not actually suitable for human life.
One more thing: a lot of times "rot" is blamed for stuff that isn't rot at all. Rot refers to a manufacturing defect that allows an ongoing chemical reaction in the disc to continue afterwards. In the case of Laserdisc this basically means that some day the disc won't work. It may be day one, it may be 10 years from now. Certain environmental factors can speed it up or slow it down but it's unavoidable if the disc wasn't sealed properly (the laquer on top of a CD) or glued back to back properly (like LD, DVD, HDDVD, BR). In the LD world people wrongly attribute all sorts of stuff to "rot". Badly aligned players, warping, mastering defects, LD manufacturing defects of a different kind. I was watching one of those dumb "I've been to a flea market, see what I got" videos a while back and a guy played a section of something, probably Star Wars knowing these f*cks, and he says "this is laser rot" when what was on the screen was in fact just some rolling dropouts, very common on CLV discs. It's a defect, but it's not rot. I have a few discs with this issue that haven't eroded one tiny bit since I bought them back in the day. Rot implies progression of some sort.
Topic: any problems with Disc Rot? (Read 645 times)
