NEC PC-Engine/SuperGrafx > PC Engine/SuperGrafx Discussion

Questions regarding Burnt CD's for PC-E

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AnnaTheBanana:
I burnt a game to test (Avenger JP, which assumedly should work with the 1.0 System Card), and while the burnt CD worked on my friend's Duo-R without any problems, the CD rom 2 in my Interface Unit got stuck on a Disc read error (Displayed as Red text on the Boot Screen, Under the Press Start text) and made a very strange noise, to which i turned off immediately.

As a test, I put in a pressed Audio CD (Thanks John Lennon!) in the CD Rom 2, powered independently away from the Interface Unit, and seemingly played smoothly without any problems or any strange noises.

I have decided to purchase a pressed CD of Ys I & II  :adol: in order to be able to see if the Disc read error and strange noises re-occur, before testing any further burns, just to be on the safe side while I hunt down a decent NTSC CRT (I live in Europe, so it's not easy to find CRT's that aren't PAL, lol)

Thanks for the info, much appreciated  :cook:

Keith Courage:
Unfortunately there isn't an overall full-proof way to make CD-R discs for DUO or PCE/Turbo CD drives.

I repair multiple systems per week and in that time I also test with CDR discs. Unfortunately every system and drive can work better with a particular CDR brand of disc vs the other. Regardless of it always being the same type of system or not.

Meaning, while one PCE DUO might work great with Cheap CDr media like basic verbatim discs(light green bottom), other DUOs will hate those and will only work good with better quality media like Taiyo Yuden brand or the nicer Verbatim(Data Life Plus) discs. Then there are some DUOs that will only work with the cheaper light green bottom discs and can't be used at all with the better quality stuff.

Sometimes systems can be made to read CDR discs better by making some minor lens adjustments or replacing the lens and other times making adjustments or changing the lens makes no difference at all.

So the best kind of media for your system is basically whatever works best for your system. You can't just go by what works good in one DUO system because another can act very differently. 

This also hold true for the White PCE drives and Black Tg16 CD drives.

Also, you don't need a CD burner that can go all the way down to 2x or 4x. Usually just setting your drive to the slowest it can go is good enough. So if you have a drive that can only go down to 12x or 8x then that's just fine.

It's more a question of how well does your particular CD burner work with the particular type of CD-R media you bought. I keep multiple CD-R drives on hand because 1 brand of media will burn more accurately with one drive vs the other.

So there are a lot of variables here.

The reason I test multiple types of discs on the systems customers send me for repair is so I can let them know what CD-R discs works best with their system.



In the past, I'd have many instances where someone would get a CD drive or duo back from me and then complain it wasn't reading discs.
I would then have to ask, are you using real game cds?  Answer (NO)
What CD-R brand discs are you using? (generic something or other)

Then I'd have to explain to them that they need to try another brand of media or a different CD burner.

This way, if I just do all the testing ahead of time and let the customer know what CD-R discs work best. It avoids all the back and forth questions later and then no worry from the customer about the state of their newly repaired CD drive. 

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