Why do CD-R's Damage the Duo Lens?

[Golgo13]

I was wondering about this, I have an old style Duo, and some real games, and some CD-Rs for some weird games, I have not had any problem playing either, is it really true that use of the CD-R's will damage the Duo? And if so, how the hell does that happen?

[Turbo D]

I know that if the cd-r is burned incorrectly, the laser will go out to the edge of the disk and get stuck. I imagine it might strain the laser if the disc is lightly burned by a crappy burner, haha.

[SignOfZeta]

They don't. The only thing that happens is that the drive sometimes ends up parked beyond its ability to bring itself back to the zero position. I'm not exactly sure why this happens, but the main point is that since the system pre-dates CD-R, weird shit is bound to happen.

[chaoticjelly]

It's an old rumour spread by people that don't like "backups" the laser has to work a little harder to read a CD-R since the pits aren't as defined as a factory-written CD, but people make out as if using a few CD-R's will kill a game console laser.. 

[nat]

Even if this were true (and it might be), it would take thousands of hours playing CD-R games for your laser's life to be shortened by any noticable amount.

There are, however, some CD-R games that just refuse to work on my Duo at all. Meteor Blaster DX, the official release, was on some kind of CD-R media. It won't boot at all on my Duo.

[Neo Rasa]

I can see why people would think this happens, since by definition anything with moving parts is going to eventually wear out, and in this case anything that makes a disk drive read media in a way it wasn't intended to is going to wear it out "faster" than normal.

Fortunately, nat is correct, and the "damage" this can cause on something like NEC's family of systems is not being an issue.*  The "makes the laser work harder" line of thought doesn't make sense for the NEC hardware because it's a CD-ROM drive to begin with.  It's not like running a CD-ROM (blue disk) game on a fat PS2 where a laser designed to quickly stream and load information off of DVDs has to read much more slowly to stream off the CD-ROM media.  The "working harder" issue with the PS2 is because it has to read at a SLOWER speed than intended for the blue disk games, most people automatically think "working harder" means working faster.

There's a reason we have 3DOs and Duos and SegaCDs and such from over a decade ago that work like a dream now while some of us same people are also on our third or fourth PS2/XBox/360/etc.  The system's that have the 1 or 2x CD-ROM drives in them by default can't exactly read any slower, whereas playing Virtua Fighter 4 on your PS2 or Eternal Darkness on your GC can actually result in dire consequences in some rare cases.

The zero position issue...honestly I haven't made or played a backup of any of these games for some time, doesn't this have more to do with the track layout and what the data the Turbo CD knows to look for first?  It's seems like something that shouldn't be a problem as more and more understanding of the systems's bios is achieved.  That said if your CD is opaque, don't even bother, in any system.


Either way it's definitely an issue exacerbated by people who think they're god because they sold their children to slavers to get their mitts on Darius Alpha.




*With disk media there's always going to be the odd case where a particular item just will not load right, or just plain won't work on some systems and so on.

[D-Lite]

The CD-R shouldn't damage the laser at all.  The only problem I see happening is that poorly burned CD-R's tend to have more errors and the Duo doesn't seem to have very good error correction at all.  Bump your Duo even slightly during CD play and the redbook audio is gone until the next disc access.  I would only think that after long periods of using CD-Rs you may find that the motor starts to wear out from repeated searching trying to read a bad disc.  But that's just a guess.

Just make sure you burn at 1x or 2x

[nat]

My burner only goes as low as 4x which seems to work OK (for the most part) for the 3 or so CD-R's I have.

What D-Lite said about the audio is true... Although on my Duo, it's to such a great extent that you don't even need to bump it. Sometimes playing CD-R games the CD audio will just stop playing as of it's own free will randomly, without being bumped.

This seems to be true with my IFU CD-ROM^2 on the SuperGrafx as well, not just the Duo.

[Turbo D]

I've burned games at 40x and they play on my duo. I know I'm crazy, but thats how I roll, lol. It hasn't had any problems. Once the sound went out, but then it came back in a few weeks later.

[nodtveidt]

My burner does 16x lowest and has never produced a PCE coaster. I think the most important factor is the quality of both the disc and the burner. Having lazy software doesn't seem to help though.

[Turbo D]

I use Nero to make exact copies of the image. The drive I use is a Sony dvd-rw. No coasters for me either 

[nodtveidt]

Nero is my weapon of choice as well. I've always used HP burners.

[D-Lite]

When I had regular access to a PC, I used CDRWin at 2x and it worked beautifully

[Kitsunexus]

Nero is my weapon of choice as well. I've always used HP burners.

Aren't HP burners Liteon anyway?

[nodtveidt]

I wouldn't know.