damn mechanics

[Tatsujin]

today, two of my cd-roms died! why? because the damn mechanics in those cd-players are damn weak!! there is a gear from the motor to the laser-sled, the middle gear wheel seems to be made out of a different material, because it's yellow instead of white as the neighbour gear weehls. and to any reason this yellow material is damn week. so today when the first cd-rom went out of order, coz some teeth where broken off while using it, i took my spare part cd-rom to take out the whole mechanical part to repalce it. after i opened it, i discovered, that the same gear weehl shows the same problem of missing some teeth! DAMN IT!!

now i can't use cd-roms for minimum a wohle week or longer! what a deprivation!!!

[Keranu]

That sucks hardcore, man. How are you going to manage to survive a week without PCE CDs!?

[nat]

You're going to have to resort to..... <gasp>..... HuCards.

[elnino]

This sucks! Reminds me of the trouble I had with my Duo CD-Rom drive a couple of months ago. It was a hard time not being able to play CD games.

[Tatsujin]

have to mess around with stinky and sloppy Hucards now until I have some time to go buy a new drive, or at the best a new (used) DUO.

@elnino-kun: yes, I remember that horrible story with your DUO CD-Rom. that one sucked dicks in hell. How did you finally solve it?

[Keranu]

Hey HuCards are great, just as good as CDs, in my opinion.

[nat]

Mine too. My last comment was dripping with sarcasm. 

[akamichi]

My CDROM died recently too and I think it's the same problem with the gears.  The drive is powers up, but the laser doesn't move at all. Luckily I have a Duo, but I like playing on my briefcase system.  I guess nearly 20 years of service ain't too bad.   But it sucks that a piece of crappy plastic is the cause.

[Tatsujin]

Mine too. My last comment was dripping with sarcasm. 

mine as well! what you guys thought?

[Keranu]

There has been a lot of "HuCard dissing" the past couple of years, so I had a hard time telling if you were serious or not .

[Tatsujin]

But it sucks that a piece of crappy plastic is the cause.

that's all the point, which made me the most sad as well as mad!! i will post some macro-pix later of the broken gear.

[Tatsujin]

There has been a lot of "HuCard dissing" the past couple of years, so I had a hard time telling if you were serious or not .

i love hucards to no end, altought cd-games imo offers more of everything (loading time included ). but you can find absolut top-notch and garbage titles on both of the media as well.

[termis]

My CDROM died recently too and I think it's the same problem with the gears.  The drive is powers up, but the laser doesn't move at all. Luckily I have a Duo, but I like playing on my briefcase system.  I guess nearly 20 years of service ain't too bad.   But it sucks that a piece of crappy plastic is the cause.

Though non-moving laser issue can be the gear, I would suspect the laser eye pickup first.  The PCEngine laser pickup tries to "see" if there's a CD-ROM inserted, then if it doesn't find anything (because of a bad laser pickup), it assumes that there is no disc inserted and the gears won't move.   This is an easy fix, as posted around on this forum (though I don't know if the common HOP-M3 laser eye pickup also fits in the briefcase system).

[Tatsujin]

but in this case, the system gives you immediately a feedback on the screen "please insert a disc", while the problem caused by the gear, the system shows you "just a moment please" probably till the end of your life!!

[elnino]

@elnino-kun: yes, I remember that horrible story with your DUO CD-Rom. that one sucked dicks in hell. How did you finally solve it?

Well, the first time the problem disappeared after I had system in the trunk of my car driving around.  The second time I didn't find a solution. I think there's something wrong with the laser, it doesn't recognise the CD-Rom at all. The gears however don't seem to be broken but I'm not too sure either. I resolved the problem by buying an interface unit with a CD-Rom drive and a core grafx. The single system CD-Rom is said to be much more stable than the one integrated in the Duo.
However, there seem to be other people encountering this problem and thumpin_termis mentioned a thread with a fix, so I'm off searching it. Maybe I will finally be able to fix my Duo which would be great because the loading time is much more annoying with the interface unit.